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PROGRAMMINGThe Golden Rule of Using AI Agents
As with many, I played around with AI agents in code. Contrary to some opinions, AI agents made me rediscover the joy of coding (for many reasons I may discuss another time). However, I am not blind, and I owe my satisfaction with AI agents to a strict mental model and practice.
If you are not a software developer and you use AI to jam together personal scripts for yourself, do not worry, you can do as you want. If you are using them to learn something, don’t worry either.
But if you are a professional coder or you want to publish your work, you have to follow the Golden Rule:
You must use an AI Agent only to do what you know how to do.
Only in this way can you be efficient with them. Only if you know how to do something can you instantly spot when the agent is doing something decent or not. Only if you know how to do something can you recognize whether the generated code is good.
This doesn’t make them less useful. I like to code algorithms, solve problems, and sketch the architecture of the various elements. So I focus on that while I let the robot work on things I loathe. Things like CLI interfaces, reporting, writing diagnostic endpoints, and other tasks I find super boring. I know how to do them; they are just boring. So I let the robot do them while I focus on the math and the algorithms.
However, be careful. The siren’s song is strong. If you are not disciplined, you may think, Why not? Why should I not use the robot for this thing I don’t know how to do?
And that’s the moment you open yourself to fatal mistakes.
Why I don't do Time Tracking
I tried multiple times but, in the end, it made things worse.
Time tracking is a popular productivity technique. Many people swear by it as the most effective intentionality tool. However, it never worked for me. It made things worse. Here, I explain the three reasons why it failed me.
Overwhelmed by your workflow? Reset it.
Productivity and organization workflows can quickly become addictive. If you like apps and all that comes with them, your workflows can snowball out of control. I run into this problem every couple of years, and until I become aware of that, I feel very frustrated. I feel like I am moving around a lot of stuff and spending many hours of my awake time producing nothing more than heat and entropy. Luckily the solution is easy: do a total reset.
You need to decide your decisions
If there is something that I learned from my daily struggle with procrastination, is that every day you just have a limited amount of decisions. Every day, you can only do 5, 8, maybe 10 meaningfully decisions. After that you will start doing mistakes, get tired and, in general, doing wrong.
What can be surprising of this, is that doesn’t matter how important the decision is. Look at a traditional day: you wake up and you need to decide what to eat for breakfast, what clothes to wear, if it is better to go to work using the car or public transportation. You have literally just waked up and you have already depleted the big part of you decision pool for the day. And none of that decision is meaningful for your work, your career, your family, your affections.
On developer anxiety
You are finally back home. During your work day your mind was totally a volcano of creativity. You have so many cool ideas to implement (or at least to sketch). You go to your machine and you start to thing to the technical details. Many questions reach your mind. Maybe too many. Is it better to use Python or Haskell, or maybe C++? I have to start implementing my game prototype with Unity or with some other engine? What if in the future I want to add “feature X” after “feature Y”? So you start crawling the web for resources, opinions and more information on your problem. And this will generate more questions. You spend two hours in this way and you are still full of doubts. Then it becomes late. You are tired. You will check out this problems tomorrow. But tomorrow you will find others problem and not even a solution. And so on. Until every project loses its momentum.