Early in my career, I was often told some version of the same advice: stop overthinking, trust your intuition, move faster.

The advice was usually well-intentioned. It also described a cognitive sequence I don’t actually experience.

For me, intuition does not arrive first. It arrives last.

When I am confident about a decision, that confidence is not a gut feeling. It is the residue of having already explored the space. I need to understand the constraints, see how the system behaves under stress, identify where the edges are, and reconcile the tradeoffs. Only after that does something that feels like intuition appear.

If I skip that process, I don’t get faster. I’m guessing instead of deciding.

This took me a long time to understand, in part because the people giving me that advice were not wrong about their experience. What differs is not the presence of intuition, but when it becomes available.

For some people, much of the work happens early and invisibly. The intuition surfaces first; the structure that produced it is only exposed when something breaks. For others, the work happens up front and in the open. The structure is built explicitly, then compressed.

In both cases, the same work gets done. What differs is when it shows and who sees it.

This is why that advice was most common early in my career, before the outcomes produced by my process were visible to others. At that stage, the reasoning looked like delay. The caution looked like uncertainty.

Over time, that feedback largely disappeared. As experience accumulated, the patterns I had built explicitly began to compress and transfer. I could recognize familiar structures across different domains and apply what I had learned without rebuilding everything from scratch.

That accumulation allowed me to move faster and produce answers that looked like immediate intuition. From the outside, it appeared indistinguishable from how others described their own experience. Internally, nothing had changed—the intuition was still downstream of the work. The work had simply become fast enough to disappear.

This is where people mistake convergence of outcomes for convergence of process.

This is where large language models change something real for people who process the way I do.

Large language models do not remove the need for exploration. They remove the time penalty for doing it explicitly.

The reasoning is still mine. The tool accelerates the exploration, not the judgment.

They make it possible to traverse unfamiliar terrain, test assumptions, surface counterexamples, and build a working model fast enough that the intuition arrives before impatience sets in. The process is unchanged. What changes is the latency.

This is why the tool does not feel like a shortcut. It doesn’t ask me to act without coherence. It allows coherence to form quickly enough to meet the pace others already assume.

For the first time, people who reason this way can move at a pace that looks like decisiveness without abandoning how their judgment actually forms.

For some people, intuition is a starting point.
For others, it is an output.

Confusing the two leads us to give bad advice, misread rigor as hesitation, and filter out capable minds before their judgment has had time to become visible.

AI doesn’t change how intuition works.
It changes how long it takes to earn it.

And for people who process this way, that difference finally matters.