In 1713, a boy named Humphrey Potter had one job: sit next to a Newcomen steam engine and turn a valve by hand, over and over, all day. Open it, and the steam would push. Close it, and the piston would reset. Open, close, open, close for hours, because that was how the machine worked. Someone had to be the valve.

The story goes that Potter got tired of being the valve. So he rigged a system of cords and catches to the engine's own beam, letting the machine's motion trip its own valves at exactly the right moment. No more standing there all day. The engine ran itself faster and steadier than Potter ever could by hand, jumping from six or eight strokes a minute to fifteen or sixteen.

When his boss found him not at his post, the story says he nearly got fired on the spot and looked like a kid slacking off. Then the boss saw what the boy had actually built, and the firing turned into something else because the work was still getting done. Better than before.

Historians will tell you the tale is probably more legend than fact. The name "potter cord" for that rigging stuck around for decades anyway, because the idea underneath it was true whether the details were exact or not: the person closest to the tedious part of the work is usually the one who sees how to remove it.

Here's the part we skip over now, three hundred years later: nobody today thinks twice about a steam engine or its modern descendants running its own valves. We don't stand next to turbines manually managing every cycle. We accepted, completely and without debate, that the machine could handle the mechanical repetition so that the human could handle the thinking.

That shift didn't feel small at the time. It felt like it might mean someone's job.

We're standing in the same doorway with AI, except this time the "valve" isn't steam; it's information, replying to the same twenty customer questions, drafting the same style of proposal, summarizing the same kind of meeting, formatting the same report. Repetitive, necessary, and mechanical in exactly the way Potter's job was mechanical. And exactly like 1713, the instinct when someone hands that repetition off to a machine is: are they actually still working?

I've watched that instinct play out in real time in my own workflow, in client work, in conversations with people building small businesses who are half-embarrassed to admit they let an AI draft the first pass of something. There's a leftover guilt attached to letting a machine do work a human used to grind through by hand. It's the same look on the boss's face in 1713, right before he saw the beam turning its own valve.

But the lesson from the steam engine isn't "the boy stopped working." It's that he stopped doing the one part of the job that never required a human being in the first place. He still had to build the rigging. He still had to know when the timing was wrong and fix it. The judgment didn't disappear; it just stopped being spent on something a cord and a catch could do just as well.

That's the actual shift AI is asking businesses to make right now. Not "replace the person," but "stop paying a person's attention for the part of the job that was never really using their brain." The valve gets automated. The judgment about what the engine should be doing stays exactly where it's always been: with the person who understands the work.

Three hundred years from now, nobody will remember which of us hesitated. They'll notice which businesses kept turning the valve by hand, and which ones built the cord.

Here's the part most people get wrong when they finally do build it, though: they let the AI think out loud, and it comes out sounding like every other AI post on your feed: same rhythm, same phrases, same hollow confidence. That's not automating the value. That's handing someone else your voice while you hand them the repetition.

The businesses that get this right don't sound automated. They sound exactly like themselves, just without the grind. That's the real work: not "add AI," but teaching it to sound like you before you let it touch anything client-facing.

If you're a solopreneur or small business owner wondering where to start, that's exactly what I help people build. Drop a comment or send me a message. Let's find your valve!

Originally published on LinkedIn. Comments and the conversation live there.