Unlearn First

Sarah Winchester started building in 1886. She didn't stop for 36 years.

Each room made sense when the carpenters finished it. Ballrooms with gold fixtures. Stained glass by Tiffany. Practical innovations years ahead of their time.

But she never paused to reassess the whole.

By 1922, the mansion had 160 rooms, 2,000 doors, and 47 stairways. Some doors opened onto walls. Some stairs climbed into ceilings.

Not because she was building badly.

Because the house had outgrown anyone's ability to hold it in their head.

That's not a haunted house story.

It's an architecture story.

Your tools are doing the same thing right now. Not once a generation. Every month.

The spreadsheet you tested last month has capabilities it didn't then. The workflow you built around a limitation is now built around a limitation that doesn't exist.

The boundary between what you do yourself and what you delegate keeps moving. It only moves in one direction.

You already feel this. The tool improved. Your usage didn't. Most of us are still optimizing walking.

Winchester's mansion wasn't crazy. It was what happens when you keep building without stopping to redraw the map.

The expensive part of AI isn't learning the tool. It's unlearning what it couldn't do yesterday.

Go deeper: The Context Flow