Waves

This is a map of everything one small firm asked for from AI, in the order it has to happen. There are no dates on it. Each box is one thing to do. Left to right is the order.

The map compares two versions of the same plan. One is the plan as the chatbot tells it: describe a thing, it appears, it works. The other is the plan as it goes, once real people, waiting and testing are counted.

The firm is made up. Its owner is called Sam, the office manager Jo, the shared inbox hello@. The order of the boxes comes from one real engagement, with the names and details changed. On top of it sit the wishes that come up in nearly every first conversation with a professional firm: accountants, lawyers, agents, advisers. A few boxes carry a commercial-leasing example; the work underneath them is the same for everyone. The words in quotation marks are the kind of thing owners say, not one person’s transcript.

The big number

10 → 31, top left, is the whole story. Ten steps if nothing had to wait and nothing had to be tested. Thirty-one once the waiting and the testing are counted. The map shows where the other twenty-one go.

Try this first

Under the seven numbers is a row of small grey buttons. Find the one that says the long chain. Put the mouse on it, press the mouse button, and keep it held. The map fades except the longest road through the plan. Let go and the map comes back. Every small button and every number at the top works the same way.

Two ways to press. Hold the button down, and it lasts as long as you hold. Or click once quickly, and it stays lit until you click it again or press the Escape key.

What the colours mean

Amber: waiting for someone to say yes, and most of those yeses are the owner’s. Red: a date nobody chose, such as the day the mailbox empties its bin or the day a lease option window closes. Blue-green: the long road, and anything on it. Grey with a dashed edge: a good idea for later, drawn where it would hang off the plan.

Click a box

Any box opens a note on the right side of the screen. It says why the box sits where it sits, and the snags already found so they are not found twice. Close the note with its Close button, or press the Escape key.

The switch

The switch in the middle of the top bar has two halves; click either half. As the chatbot tells it shows the plan as if nothing waited and nothing had to be tested twice. As it goes shows the plan as it will actually go. Same plan, different length; the number at the top left changes with it. Start again, at the top right, puts everything back the way it opened.

Five words

Wave. One round of waiting, or one round of testing. Not a week. The long chain. The longest road through the plan, drawn in blue-green. Shorten anything on it and everything moves. A yes. A decision only one person can make. A round. Test it with one person, fix what they find, test again. ∞. A thing with no “what good looks like” written down, so its testing has no end.

From the trenches

The first day is easy. You describe a thing, it appears, it works. The second week is where the time goes. The thing has to work for Jo in accounts, not only for you. It has to work on the shared mailbox nobody owns. It has to keep working after the AI tool changes, which happens a few times a year, without warning. And on the real project it stopped one week and told nobody; the map has a box for that. Each of those is a round of testing, and each round is a wave on this map.

The way out is not to build less. It is to write one line before building: what good enough looks like. Then testing knows when to stop.