Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s CTO, told employees that whatever time AI gives back should turn into more output, not shorter hours. The internet did what it does. I don’t find the position offensive, honestly. If a company hands you a tool that doubles what you can ship, expecting more shipping is not some grand betrayal of the social contract.

What bothers me is the assumption sitting underneath it: that the surplus already exists and the only live question is who gets to keep it.

Because the same week Boz’s comments went around, so did the “GDP shows no evidence of an AI productivity boom” headlines and another round of complaints about AI productivity pollution — slop docs, slop PRs, slop summaries that some poor colleague downstream now has to actually read. Management wants to spend a windfall. The macro data can’t locate it.

The surplus is real for about four tasks

First drafts. Explaining unfamiliar code. Summarizing something long. Turning a rough thought into a clean paragraph.

Those four are genuinely faster now. And every single one of them happens inside a chat window, and every single one of them ends with you selecting the output, copying it, switching tabs, and pasting it into the place where the work actually lives.

Nobody’s day is bottlenecked on prose

Look at your own week honestly. The hours don’t go to composing sentences. They go to the logged-in tabs: the CRM, the ATS, the ticket queue, the vendor portal that still looks like it was designed in 2011, the inbox, the invoice tool your finance team picked without asking anyone.

That work is not hard. It’s just resistant to being pasted into a chat box, because doing it requires being logged in as you, on that page, right now.

So where do the gains actually come from?

Three places, and none of them involve a chat window.

Forms. A vendor sends a PDF invoice, you open the PDF in one tab, the accounting portal in another, and then you spend four minutes doing nothing but reading a number out of one rectangle and typing it into a different rectangle six inches away. Multiply by thirty invoices. An agent sitting in the side panel of that same browser reads the PDF tab and fills the portal tab, because both are already open and already authenticated. No OAuth flow, no integration, no API that finance would have to request access to.

Inbox triage. Not “write me an email” — the other half. Reading forty unread messages, deciding which eleven need a reply today, labeling the rest, and drafting three responses that reference a thread from last month. Gmail is open. You’re signed in. The agent works the same tab you’re working, which means it can see the thread, the labels, and the person’s last message without anyone exporting anything.

Extraction across tabs. Nine candidate profiles open, and you want a comparison table. Six product pages, and you want the specs side by side. This is the one people underestimate, because it feels too small to automate and yet it eats twenty minutes at a stretch, several times a week.

That’s roughly what Dassi does, and the reason it’s a Chrome extension rather than a website is precisely this: it needs the session state you already have.

Measured wrong

The productivity studies keep measuring the chat window. Then they act surprised when GDP shrugs.

The model isn’t the constraint

Bosworth is directionally right, which is what makes the framing frustrating. There is a surplus available. It’s just not sitting where anyone’s counting it.

Because the model in the chat window and the model driving my browser are the same model, running identical weights, billed to the same key, and the only real difference between them is whether it can see the page I’m looking at when I ask for something. Bring your own Claude key, or sign in with the ChatGPT subscription you already pay for. The intelligence was never the bottleneck. The copy-paste tax was.

Give an agent your actual tabs and the gains stop being theoretical. Whether your employer then converts that into more output or into leaving at 4pm is a fight worth having, but it’s a fight about a surplus that has to exist first.

Right now most people are arguing over the division of something they haven’t produced yet.