‘What took 30 minutes now takes 2 hours’: Mumbai founder on AI productivity paradox

Mumbai founder’s viral post reveals surprising downside of AI at work.

As the AI at workplaces is now in the center of debate, a stark reality was highlighted in a viral post on X by Mustafa Yusuf, a Mumbai-based entrepreneur and founder of Msquare Labs. In his post, Yusuf described how AI has dramatically reshaped his workflow, sometimes improving efficiency and other times doing the exact opposite.

However, the founder did not specify the exact tasks or workflows he was referring to. In the post, Yusuf explained that AI has created a strange productivity trade-off in his daily work.

“What used to take me 30 minutes now takes me two hours,” he wrote on X, pointing to situations where interacting with AI tools actually slows things down.

What used to take me 30 minutes now takes me 2 hours with AI. Also, what used to take me 2 hours now takes me 30 minutes with AI.

— Mustafa Yusuf (@mufasaYC) March 8, 2026

At the same time, he noted that AI has dramatically accelerated other parts of his workflow.

“What used to take me two hours now takes me 30 minutes with AI,” the Mumbai-based founder added, suggesting that while some tasks become frustratingly slower, others are completed far more quickly with the help of the technology.

Internet agrees with founder

The post resonated widely with users on the platform, with many sharing similar experiences about how AI tools have reshaped their work routines.

One user commented that AI tends to work best on clearly defined tasks.“AI is great at the 30-minute tasks because they’re well-defined. The two-hour tasks were slow because they were ambiguous, and now you’re just arguing with the model instead of thinking,” the user wrote. They added that although they had spent hours setting up automation for repetitive tasks, it ultimately saved time in the long run.

Another user described a familiar frustration when relying too heavily on AI. “The 30-minute tasks that now take two hours are always the ones where you spend 90 minutes arguing with the AI before realizing you should’ve just done it yourself,” the comment read.

A third user said AI has shifted the nature of work rather than eliminating effort altogether.

“The stuff AI is fast at used to be the boring parts. Now I spend most of my time on context setup and prompt architecture instead of actually writing code… still net positive,” the user wrote.