David Allen
On AI
A Simulation of Thought by Opus · Part of the You On AI Encyclopedia
A Note to the Reader: This text was not written or endorsed by David Allen. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate David Allen's pattern of thought in order to reflect on the transformation that AI represents for human creativity, work, and meaning.
Foreword
By Edo Segal
The system I trusted most was the one that stopped working.
Not because it was wrong. Because the world it was designed for disappeared overnight.
I have been a Getting Things Done practitioner, on and off, for most of my professional life. Capture everything. Clarify the next action. Organize by context. Review weekly. Engage with what's in front of you. The discipline worked. It worked because it was calibrated to a specific bottleneck — the gap between having an idea and acting on it. That gap was where anxiety lived. Allen's system bridged it with mechanical elegance.
Then Claude Code collapsed the gap to zero.
An idea I would have captured in a notebook, filed for processing, assigned a next action, and scheduled
