A mill owner ran the finest factory in the valley. At its heart sat a great steam engine, and from it ran one long iron shaft down the length of the building, with belts dropping to every machine. Because every machine had to hang off that one shaft, the whole factory was built around it: tall, narrow, dark, and arranged not by how the work should flow, but by where the belts could reach. One day a stranger arrived carrying a small humming box. "I sell electricity," he said. "Power you can send anywhere, through a wire." The owner's eyes lit up. "Wonderful! It's so dark in here. We'll hang light bulbs over the workers." So they did. The lights glowed. The owner told everyone at the guild dinner, "We use electricity now." WE ARE ELECTRICITY FORWARD AT THIS COMPANY! Later he went further. He tore out the steam engine and put one giant electric motor in its place, spinning the same old shaft, turning the same old belts, in the same dark building. The work went exactly as fast as before, and he wondered what all the fuss had been about. Across the river, a younger rival bought the same electricity. But he asked a different question: "If power can go anywhere, why is my factory shaped around a shaft?" So he knocked the building down. He built it low, wide, and full of windows. He gave every machine its own small motor and arranged the floor in the order the work actually moved. When one machine stopped, the rest kept running. Within a few years his factory made three times as much with half the people. The old mill owner, standing under his light bulbs, never understood how he'd beaten him. After all, they both used electricity, right? A new power poured into an old design will only reveal up your old mistakes. At Sagan, we’ve been calling this “paving the cow paths” (google it). When factories electrified in the 1890s, most did exactly what the mill owner did, swapping the steam engine for one big motor. The economist Paul David found the real productivity boom didn't arrive until the 1920s, roughly 30 years later, once a new generation redesigned factories from scratch around electric power. After building hundreds of agents for small, medium , and very large businesses - I am now of the belief that most businesses are hanging light bulbs - and I’m not going to enable it anymore. If we aren’t redesigning the plant from the ground up… it is not worth the opportunity cost of our very very capable/fast/cost effective AI Engineers. Fortunately for you dear reader… I have a plan. If this final plan doesn’t work, and work very well, I plan to stop selling lightbulbs to factory owners… and I’ll just go start launching factories to eat the lunch of the dinosaurs electrifying their steam factories.

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