I've had the job everyone thinks they want. I was the one in every meeting. I heard the options, I made the call, I said "let's do that one" and then other people went and built it.

It's a good job. But there's a part of it nobody warns you about, and it's the waiting.

Years ago I was building a church management system with a team of about eight. Engineers, support, the lot.

We decided to build a group finder. A way for someone to land on a church's site and find a small group near them that suited them. We spent hours planning it. Proper hours. Whiteboards, edge cases, what happens when a group is full, what happens when nobody lives nearby. Then it went into sprint planning, and then it went into a sprint, and then another one.

Weeks went by. We shipped it. And it worked, it was fine.

But the honest maths on it still bothers me. Eight people's attention, hours of planning, weeks of build, all that salary. And the value we got back probably wasn't worth what it cost to find out.

That's the thing about the boss's chair that nobody tells you. Thinking is fast. I could have that idea before lunch. Work is slow. And because the work is slow and expensive, you only ever test the ideas you're already fairly confident about. The weird ones die in your head, because you can't justify eight people spending a fortnight on a hunch. That feels like discipline at the time. Looking back, I think it was the price tag doing my thinking for me.

That's what has actually changed, and it isn't "AI writes code."

I still do the boss part. I'm still in every meeting, except I'm the only one in the room. I still pick the shape of it, what we ship and what we don't, what's good enough. I still get the fun of it, the progress, the thing existing at the end.

But the gap between deciding and seeing has collapsed. That same group finder, today, I could have a working proof of concept in front of me before the end of the day. Not a mockup. A thing I can click. If it's rubbish, it's rubbish by dinner and it cost me almost nothing to learn that. If it's good, the final version isn't weeks away either.

So I test things I would never have put a team on. The tangents. The hunches. The ideas I'd have been embarrassed to pitch to eight people. Most of them don't survive, which I now find out in an afternoon, which is the whole point.

No salaries either. No payroll, no contracts, no one quitting halfway through, no one sick of being asked to do it a fourth time because I changed my mind.

Right now we're building Hey Burrow, a check-in product for churches, with a couple of mates.

It's the same category of problem I was solving back then, with a fraction of the people, and I'm finding the comparison fascinating. The same feature that would have been a two sprint conversation is a morning. The decisions I used to defer because they were expensive to get wrong, I just try both ways and look at them.

Here's the part I'd push back on, because I see people getting this wrong.

The planning doesn't go away. It matters more.

Don't try to one shot everything. Don't drop a paragraph in and hope for a product. Those hours we spent on the whiteboard for the group finder weren't the waste. The waste was how long it took to find out. Every one of those questions still needs answering, and now you're the one answering all of them, with nobody to catch what you missed.

A bad boss with a fast team just produces bad things faster. If you don't know what good looks like, you'll approve rubbish. If you can't say "no, do it again," you'll ship the first draft of everything. If you can't hold the whole thing in your head, you'll end up with twelve half-built features and no product. That's not the team's fault. That's the boss failing at the only job the boss has.

So the skill didn't disappear. It moved. It used to be split between deciding and doing, and now it's nearly all deciding. Plan it properly, then let it get built in an afternoon.

Most people spend years waiting for permission to make decisions. Waiting to be senior enough, trusted enough, promoted enough to be the one who gets to say yes.

You can have that chair today.

What would you try if it only cost you an afternoon?

-Ben