AI Productivity Doesn't Mean What I Thought It Means

Automating draft scaffolding does not shrink human editing time; it raises the output ceiling. A closed-loop taste flywheel cuts draft churn from 47 to 3 while line-level edits hold steady at a median of 136, shifting effort from structural triage to rhetorical precision. Across five years of writing, the quality floor surged: the 10th percentile gained twice as much as the 90th.