Headroom

Date: Mar 04, 2025

I know it’s a lot less cool to talk about these days, but I was one of the first people to get a Tesla Model X. My VIN showed it was the 2550th off the line, and I even toured the factory. I was excited. But the thing that really stood out to me wasn’t the battery or the acceleration—it was self-driving mode.

Cars had lane-keeping for a while, but I always struggled with driving. It wasn’t that I was bad at it—I just found it overwhelming. Too much information, too much to process. My brain was running at full CPU just keeping track of everything: lane position, traffic flow, speed control.

When I got the Model X, that changed. Suddenly, I had a little bit of that cognitive load taken off my plate. I was still paying attention, still engaged, but I wasn’t maxed out. It moved me from the red zone—where long drives were exhausting—to the green zone—where I actually enjoyed them. It wasn’t about being passive. If anything, I was more strategic. Instead of constantly reacting, I could think ahead. I had headroom.

Fast forward to today, and I’ve been getting the same feeling using AI coding tools. The other day, I was deep in a complex data transformation—mapping one structured dataset onto another. There were mismatched types, edge cases, and just enough complexity to make it tedious. I was using an AI assistant to help with some of the function generation, and suddenly, I realized: this feels just like driving with Autopilot.

The AI wasn’t writing my code for me, just like my car wasn’t driving for me. But it was handling the low-level, immediate tasks—reading the types, filling in obvious gaps, taking care of boilerplate. And that freed me up. Instead of focusing on syntax, I was thinking about architecture. Instead of getting stuck in minutiae, I was stepping back and considering the bigger picture. I had room to think.

There’s an old joke: we have to write dumb code, because debugging is harder. If you use all your intellectual energy writing something clever, you won’t have enough left to untangle it when things go wrong. That same principle applies here. AI tools give me just enough cognitive relief that I can focus on making better decisions. I can think about the next step while the AI helps me execute the current one.

It reminds me of that xkcd comic where two devs are sword-fighting while their code compiles. That’s kind of what’s happening now, except instead of waiting for a compiler, I’m thinking through strategy while my AI assistant fills in gaps and makes tactical moves in real-time. The work is still getting done, but I have more space to be thoughtful about it.

That’s the shift that excites me—not just being faster or more productive, but getting to operate at a higher level. AI isn’t about checking out. It’s about getting headroom back. And once you have it, it’s hard to go back.