Pass the Butter

Uploaded image — Butter Passer Robot (Rick and Morty)

There’s a meme among programmers where if you’re asked to do something quickly - an engineer will spend hours coming up with a solution - that will never recoup the time that it saves.

I have sympathy with this - as I recently spent an hour trying to create a shortcut on my phone to report the constantly overflowing bins on our street to the council.

The short story is that I failed. I could have pushed through but before I started I told my AI assistant that I don’t want to spend more than half an hour on that. And we eventually agreed that the ‘juice wasn’t worth the squeeze’.

The reality is in the past month with the release of solutions like OpenClaw and Claude Opus 4.6 there is a shift happening where more people are realising the power of what can be achieved.

Vibe coding even 6 months ago often ended in frustrating loops and large amounts of inefficient code.

But the rate of improvement is rapid and we can only presume it will increase.

Although frustratingly we’re not at the point where on a mobile device we can (easily) have an agent open a web browser and fill in a short form.

But that will change. It won’t be long before I can tell my Alexa to “report the overflowing bin” - and it will comply.

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should

As we move into a world where it’s getting increasingly possible to automate tasks with apps that we’ve vibe coded, and eventually robots that can work for us, the possibilities and opportunities are endless. But our time is not.

I’m the kind of person that can get lost in building a solution. I also love learning. We learn best by doing.

There are probably thousands of tutorials now on how to utilise AI to build autonomous agents.

Clawdbot - now OpenClaw - opened peoples eyes to where things are headed.

An AI Agent that we can message, that can actually get things done, and won’t get stuck waiting for you to reply.

The question is going to be - how much time should I dedicate to the learning of how to push AI to the max, and automating tasks?

And at what cost?

Time with friends and family, hobbies, sport, writing etc…

I’m in no doubt 2026 is ushering in a new era of tech like we’ve never seen before.

My question to myself is: how much time should I devote to it?