I had a conversation with an AI the other day that impressed me, and not because of the code it wrote. It didn’t write any.

The setup

Big table. Lots of rows. I needed to filter by date.

Problem: there was no index on the date column. Every query was a full scan, and everything took forever.

And adding one wasn’t an option. An index there has to go through approval, and that halts the whole process. So all my research, all my analytics, just ran into a rock.

Bummer.

What the AI did

It noticed the table had auto-incrementing IDs.

If rows get inserted as they happen, a higher ID means a later date. So the IDs are already sorted by date, more or less. And the primary key is indexed.

So it just did a binary search. By hand. Pick an ID in the middle, look at its date, go left or right. Repeat until you land on the boundary. A handful of lookups, each one instant.

No script. No migration. No new index. Just a few queries and the range it needed.

Viveza

In Chile we have a word for this: viveza. The closest English is being street smart. It’s not about knowing more. It’s about seeing the shortcut that was always there.

Intelligence on tap

Could I have figured this out myself? Probably. If this were a big blocker on something I really cared about, I’d have given it more time and gotten there.

But that’s not the point. This wasn’t a career-defining query. I wasn’t giving it my all. I just stumbled into a problem, couldn’t reach any further, and was about to give up on it.

And the AI unblocked me. Just like that.

That’s the realization. It’s not about whether the AI is smarter than me. It’s not a competition. It’s that I had this kind of thinking on tap, for a problem that wasn’t worth my full attention. Intelligence on tap, for the small stuff nobody cares about. Think about how it compounds for a minute.