Slow Down to Speed Up

First things first: this newsletter is a labor of love and sometimes, producing the text, the audio, and the sketch is a lot to accomplish each week. This week, I almost didn’t get it done. So I did what any normal person would do in 2025, I turned to ChatGPT. I fed the model about a dozen of my sketches and then asked it to produce an image of an aircraft clock in the style of my own charcoal sketches. It did a good job. It did a great job, actually. Well, fortunately for you (and for my integrity as an artist), my flight was delayed, so I did have time to finish my own charcoal sketch of the aircraft clock.But listen, the ChatGPT clock was really good. I’m almost embarassed to share with you my rubbish aircraft clock now that I’ve seen what ChatGPT can do. BUT I made a commitment. One post per week with a sketch to match. So here you have it, my post and my sketch (which is far worse than the ChatGPT sketch).There is a saying among pilots: “Slow down to speed up.” The idea is that when things go bad in an airplane—an emergency light flashes on the illuminator panel, you hit a bird, you lose an engine—there is a real risk that adrenaline will overpower reason and cause the pilot to do utterly stupid things. Instead, the pilot should “slow down to speed up.” Or, as other instructor pilots put it, “slow is smooth and smooth is fast.” Or some instructors tell students to “wind the clock.” (This one is pretty anachronistic because modern airplanes don’t have clocks that require winding anymore. But in the old days, when something went wrong, sometimes, the best way to prevent reacting in a stupid way was to take a moment to wind the clock).Researchers at Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR) published a paper recently to suggest that, when it comes to using AI in coding, maybe developers should “slow down to speed up." ... This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chapainsights.substack.com/subscribe