What actually runs in the background
Work that can be finished in the dark has one thing in common: someone already decided what finished means. Compress the images. Backfill the column. Rename the files. The target was fixed before the work started, which is why a machine can hit it at three in the morning without asking anybody anything.
That is most of the work. It is genuinely most of it, and handing it over is genuinely a good trade. Run everything you can this way.
What stops
The other kind of work has no target yet. Deciding which four thousand rows are worth keeping isn’t a slower version of deleting them — it’s a different job, and it’s yours. So is knowing that a customer on his third email doesn’t want his money back, he wants somebody to say the thing out loud. So is reading copy that is clean, correct, and not yours.
An agent gets to these moments fast and cheap, and then it stops. Stopping is the honest behaviour. The lane isn’t slow, it’s parked — and it stays parked until you show up.
Letting it choose is not a shortcut
Handing the decision back doesn’t delete it. It moves it somewhere you won’t watch it happen, and you meet it again later in different clothes: a customer who left, a page that sounds like everyone else’s page, a dependency nobody here understands.
Some decisions are cheap enough to give away, and giving those away is the whole point. Knowing which ones are cheap is, unfortunately, also a judgement call.
The number that matters
Everyone measures hours saved. The number that actually decides how much you can run at once is how often the work has to come back to you, and how long it sits there when it does.
You can push that number down. Decide things once instead of every time. Put your taste somewhere the machine can read it. Let the questions pile up so you answer eight in one sitting rather than eight times a day. What you can’t do is get it to zero — zero would mean nothing being built needed you, and then it’s fair to ask who it’s being built for.
Run what you can in the background. Be there for the rest.