The 500-Hour Job

The call went out: ten thousand product descriptions needed rewriting, and the deadline wasn't moving.

I started the only way I knew how — by hand, one at a time. About three minutes each once you're warmed up and you've stopped rereading your own sentences. Ten thousand of those is five hundred hours. Twelve weeks of somebody doing nothing else.

I ran that math somewhere in the first afternoon. It was obvious we were going to blow past the date.

So I went and found a colleague on the data side and asked him straight: couldn't AI get us there faster? I'd been doing prompt engineering on the side. He'd been doing more of it than I had.

He said yes — with the right prompts. Feed it the format. Teach it what good looks like. And the moment he said that, the other half landed for me: if we could generate them at that quality, I could import the results straight into the client's store instead of anybody re-keying ten thousand of anything.

It took a few cycles to get right. This was early days, back when most of the department wanted nothing to do with any of it.

It worked. We cut the time roughly in half and hit a deadline that, an hour earlier, had looked impossible.

What I actually took from it

The tool wasn't the interesting part. It still isn't — and the tools from back then have all been replaced twice over since.

The job only got found because somebody was doing it by hand.

If I'd been running that project from a status spreadsheet instead of typing description number forty, I'd never have done the arithmetic. Nobody schedules time to count what a task costs. You only feel it when it's your afternoon disappearing.

That's still how it goes. The processes worth automating are never the ones on the org chart. They're the ones somebody is quietly absorbing — and the person absorbing them is usually too far inside it to step back and count.

Counting is the job. That's the whole reason the audit exists.

What this is, and what it isn't

Being straight about the provenance

This happened at a previous employer, working alongside a colleague, for a client of theirs. It isn't an AInbinder engagement and I'm not going to dress it up as one.

The numbers are reconstructed, not metered. Ten thousand descriptions at about three minutes each is where the five hundred hours comes from, and "roughly half" is what we saw at the time — not something anyone put a stopwatch to.

My first proper case study — my own client, my own build, numbers I measured, with the window stated — is still ahead of me. When it exists it'll be on this page, with their name on it if they'll let me use it.

The 500-hour job

What I actually took from it

What this is, and what it isn't

Being straight about the provenance

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