Ideas Were Never the Problem
For as long as I can remember, my head has moved faster than my hands could follow. Ideas arrive in bursts: connected, half-formed, ten at once. By the time I've wrestled the first one into a sentence, spelled right, in the right order, three more have already shown up wanting attention. I'm dyslexic, which is the actual mechanism here. My brain builds meaning associatively, in leaps. Written language demands one word at a time, in order. For years the tax on every idea was translation: could I get it out fast enough, clean enough, to be taken seriously, before I lost it to the next idea already crowding in.
Design became my workaround before I had a name for it. Visual thinking doesn't make you queue your thoughts in a line. A sketch, a board, a flow can hold five ideas at once, the way my head does. I built a career on the one channel where speed of thought and speed of output were finally close: I could hold the whole system and the detail at the same time, and show it, without going through the bottleneck of spelling it out.
But even design has a translation tax. Every idea still had to become a deck, a doc, a brief someone else could act on. That's where the gap reopened. I knew exactly what I meant. Getting a stakeholder, a team, a brief to know it too, in words, at the speed I was thinking, that was the part that drained me.
AI didn't give me ideas. I have plenty of those. What it closed was the distance between having one and getting it into a form other people can use. I bring the thing that was never the bottleneck: knowing what I want, the taste to tell a strong direction from a weak one, seeing a system before anyone else does. AI brings the thing that was: fast, clean execution, on demand, in whatever shape the moment needs, a brief, a mockup, a structure, without me slowing my thinking down to the speed of my typing.
That's the part of the "AI helps neurodiverse people" conversation that gets flattened into something smaller than it is. Assistive tech usually means helping someone keep up. This is different. The output pipe finally matches the size of what's coming through it. My ideas didn't get better. My ability to make and communicate them did, and those were never the same skill, even though most workplaces are built as if they are.
I don't think I'm an edge case. Anyone whose thinking has ever outrun their tools, because of how their brain works, because they were never trained in the "right" format, because English isn't their first language, is about to feel this same shift. The scarce skill was never spelling, or syntax, or knowing the software. It was always knowing what you want to say and having the judgement to know when it's right. That part doesn't get automated. It just finally gets heard.