# Your AI twiddles its thumbs 77% of the year.

Louis Amira, November 9, 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, and the slowest writes 60.

> An hour: you read 48 pages. It writes 720.
>
> A workday: you read one novel. It writes all seven Harry Potter books.
>
> A work year: 95,000 pages vs 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 we both know who the slow poke is.)

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

So, sure, treat yourself to the smarter model. Just know you're missing the far bigger opportunity: running it 24/7. That's all a "software factory" is.

The simplest version:

1. Before you leave, give it a full day's job (say, rank the last 200 support emails).
2. Have it draft replies. Nothing gets sent, bought or deleted overnight.
3. Have it check its own work and put 3 sentences on top.
4. In the morning, read the 3 sentences.

Pro move: let it pitch you what it thinks is useful next.

Pro pro move: swipe left and right on its pitches so it learns to pitch you even better.

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). We do a lot more, but we'll save that for another time.

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