Tool Lock-In: Why AI Is Stuck Using Human Tools
Prior reading: Competitive Dynamics and Safety Humans and AI Are Limited by Different Things Human Bottlenecks Working memory: ~7 items. Can't hold a full codebase in mind. Speed: Slow reading, slow typing, slow context-switching. Attention: Serial processor. Can focus on one thing at a time. Consistency: Fatigue, boredom, emotion. Performance degrades over a day. Bandwidth: Eyes and fingers. We interact with computers through tiny I/O channels. AI Bottlenecks Context window: Large but finite. No persistent memory across sessions without scaffolding. Grounding: No physical intuition, no lived experience, no embodied sense of consequence. Reliability: Confident and wrong. Hallucinates. Struggles with precise multi-step reasoning over long horizons. Agency: No persistent goals, no ability to autonomously decide what to work on next (without scaffolding). Verification: Can generate but struggles to verify its own outputs. These are different bottlenecks. Tools optimized for one set actively conflict with the other. ...