# Your AI sits idle 77% of the year.

Louis Amira, November 10, 2026. https://louisamira.com/idle-77-percent/ (on X: https://x.com/louisamira/status/2119828369453834675)

You read about 4 words a second.

I timed four popular AI models writing the same 1,200-word memo. The slowest wrote 60 words a second. The fastest wrote 93.

So even the slow one writes about 15x faster than you can read. Scale that up (slowest AI, and you reading nonstop):

> An hour: you read 48 pages. It writes 720.
>
> A workday: you read one long novel. It writes all seven Harry Potter books, with three hours to spare.
>
> A work week: you read 1,900 pages. It writes 28,800.
>
> A work year: you read 95,000 pages. It writes 1.4 million.

![Bar chart of pages: you read 48 an hour against your AI's 720, then 380 vs 5,760 in a workday, 1,900 vs 28,800 in a week, and 95,000 vs 1,440,000 in a year.](https://louisamira.com/idle-77-percent/chart.png)
*Same 15x every time. The gap is what grows.*

(Writing isn't working, of course. Plenty of those pages would be junk. But it tells you who the slow one is, and it isn't the AI.)

Now the part that bugs me.

A year has 8,760 hours. A full-time job is about 2,000 of them. Most people only use AI while they're sitting in front of it, so for the other 6,760 hours it just... waits.

That's 77% of the year. Nights, weekends, the commute, the dentist.

![A year drawn as 8,760 squares, one per hour. The 2,000 work hours are gold; the other 6,760 are blue.](https://louisamira.com/idle-77-percent/year.png)
*Each row is a week, each square an hour. Gold is you at your desk.*

And the 23% when you *are* there? You're the bottleneck anyway. It writes 15 pages in the time you read one.

So the cheapest upgrade most people can make isn't a smarter model. It's giving the one you already have a night shift.

That's all a "software factory" is. People throw the phrase around like everyone already knows how to run one. Most don't. Here's the simplest version:

- Before you leave, hand it one job that would take a person a full day. Read the last 200 support emails and sort the complaints. Draft three versions of the pricing page. Check 20 competitors' prices.
- Drafts only. Nothing gets sent, bought or deleted overnight. (Rule from my last post: make each mistake small.)
- Ask it to check its own work and put three sentences at the top.
- In the morning, read the three sentences. Open the rest only if something looks off.

Do that every weeknight and the 77% starts working for you.

Showing *how* to build these, step by step, is most of what we write about at [@theunbiasedco](https://x.com/theunbiasedco).

*I co-founded [@theunbiasedco](https://x.com/theunbiasedco), which builds all sorts of stuff with (and for) AI agents.*