The Scaffolding

Sometime in 2020, on a Friday night, a bug in our settlement automation charged every cardholder in Iceland three times over. A file had been sent to Visa repeatedly: bad automation, not enough storage. There was no one but me.

I had no idea what I was doing. I downloaded Visa’s technical manuals and started reading. I opened the settlement files — raw codes, raw text — and tried to understand how to reverse what had happened. I had never built a reversal file. I figured it out line by line, built the file, and sent it back. By Saturday it was done.

There was no playbook. There was no AI. There was just the problem and whatever I could bring to it.

You had a night like that. Maybe not a settlement file. Maybe it was a deploy at 2am or a merchant you talked off a ledge. But you remember the feeling — the work was just the work, and you were enough for it.

Then the scaffolding went up. It had to. Companies grow, and growth needs structure. But scaffolding has a habit of becoming the building. One day you look up and there are three layers between you and the person on the other end of the phone, and you can’t remember when they arrived.

If I’d had what we have now on that Friday night, I wouldn’t have needed six hours. Maybe forty minutes. Maybe ten. Not because the machine is smarter than I was. Because it would have cleared everything between me and the problem. That’s what AI actually does. It dissolves the scaffolding. It gives you back that Friday night — the version of you who didn’t know what was impossible and went ahead and tried it. Not to make you faster. To make you closer to the merchant who trusted us with their livelihood.

Seven years ago, there was one Slack channel and no one in it but me. Every notification since became a heartbeat: the phone ringing with someone who needed us to be sharper than we were yesterday. Your rhythm synchronises with the company’s. You stop noticing. It just becomes how your heart beats. Until you step away, and it doesn’t.

Love your craft. But don’t fall in love with it. The craft is a vessel. Lose sight of who it serves and it becomes decoration. Guard your heart. Guard it from the noise that pretends to be work. It accumulates so quietly you only notice when the rhythm changes.

Next time you feel it — the distance between you and the reason you came here — close it. Pick up the phone. Answer that message. Skip the meeting. Go back to the problem. Solve it.

The scaffolding will come down on its own. It was never meant to be permanent.

The notifications stop for me today. The rhythm won’t.

Thank you, Teya. For all of it.