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Social Media is dead, interest media killed it long ago. I no longer feel like I’m connecting to people, creating community, having fun, learning. I feel like I’m being shoveled slop from the slop machine, I’m sure mostly create by well intentioned people just trying to make it in the world, trying to make their mark, trying to make something of themselves. The algos long lost the idea of subs and likes, and transitioned to how long you will pause on a topic. What used to be a series of recognizable faces, names, avatars, each with their own personality that I could come to learn and know who was just trollin, who was serious, is now mostly unrecognizable. Platforms have changed and fractured communities people went separate ways, not all the same ways. No one community is like it used to be, and its hard to find.

Agents suck

Get left behind if you don’t use them

Burn out if you use them too much

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I saw today in work chat something along the lines of “we need bigger context windows” “compaction times are holding us back”. Maybe I’m just blessed with the lack of lord jira, maybe juggle too many projects at once and they are all pretty much done when I get back. Maybe I do more long running specs and spend time making good plans that it does not matter.

Anyways the point I’m getting to is that if you think that compaction is your main issue slowing you down, and 10x this if you are a manager thinking this is what is slowing down your team you need to look at your workflow. Not because it sucks. Not only because it could be better. Because you are signing yourself and your team up for burnout if you are sitting there watching these things run like waiting for paint to dry and firing more prompts at them as soon as they are done. It feels easy. It feels like you are going fast. Its eating more brainpower than you think, and its not getting you to your...

Part of @steveyegge ’s gastown/beads is a prompt “Lets land the plane”. It’s very straightforward forward and what any sane human would probably do before finishing work, except the last part. The “generate a handoff prompt for the next session” was not something I’ve put much thought into. But now that I juggle 6 sessions at a time and often end up with 20 sessions open because I don’t want to close them and loose the last bit of context. This is what I need to keep from crippling my laptop memory from all of these stale sessions hanging around.

Taken from https://ianbull.com/posts/beads

I don’t want to review the pr, I dont want to fight the mass of changes clobbered across the codebase. I want to own my platform. With everything changing with agents writing more code than I can imagine in a day work looks different now. I still want to work with real people. I want to collaborate on ideas. I want someone to bounce ideas off with. I want someone else in the war room with me on launch day, or when the whole thing goes down. But I don’t them slopping in my sandbox, if someone is going to be stirring the slop in my product I want it to be me. Work is feeling different now. New lines need to be drawn in new directions. Expectations are changing, the way work is completed is changing, and we are all here trying to figure out what this looks like moving forward.

When agents do the work its harder to recognize a dead end.

All we are hearing lately is Agents are the future, something flipped around NOV 2025 with opus 4.5. It turned snake oil into action. It changed programmers will be replaced in 6 months to now. Not all of them, but probably most of us who are not extraordinary. If you fall into the camp of folks not adopting, I got no issues with that. No one is twisting your arm, well maybe your boss or cto is, thats on them. I don’t mean to say this is the future as in, get in or get left behind. I mean it as this is where your other engineers probably are, the junior to mid level engineers are here. If you are not trying to meet them where they are how are you going to lead them.

I just stumbled into an image in my org chart of someone who clearly turned themself into a Studio Ghibli character in chatgpt during the small window of time that it seemed to do this for everything. Its clearly the aesthetic that It would do by default for that week, then would not do it whatsoever. I’d link it, but its from an org chart. I mostly found it interesting how we now have these recognizable artifacts from specific moments in time.

I feel like there’s an inevitable phase to every ai/agentic worked feature/epic where you have to get in and chat with it 2025 style (except it actually works and doesn’t turn your project to shit). Planning is great, planning out epics for full orchestrator’s to churn for hours on is amazing, but it always leaves me with a handful of thorns multiplied by complexity level of things that I can shout a list of 6 items at a time that it can one shot. I haven’t seen anyone put a name to this phase yet, so I’m going to call it the UAT phase for now and it seems like a very necessary part of the SDLC. It was important before, but feels more so now as engineers distance themselves from the implementation.

I heard this term yesterday, and I think a lot of people are missing out on step 1. It’s important to experiment with agents and learn what they can do well and what they cant, this changes every couple of weeks at this point. You might be spending hours planning something that could have been implemented right away, or maybe wasted time planning something that needed more research, more context engineering. Agents start fresh every session, they cant remember what you asked them to do 5 minutes ago in the other session, getting the right tokens in session is critical.

I wrote some code by hand on Sunday. Sat down with my son and started building out a game in pygame from scratch. We went to google, we searched how to do something, we copy and pasted from the docs. Not because we are dumb, but because we cant remember some aspects of the pygame api. Now that these patterns are established we no longer have to google them, we simply grep our codebase and replicate the pattern. Easy right? It’s funny that it took ai to coin the term context poisoning even though it was there all along.

Agents cannot replace the thinking, they only amplify it. If you set the agents off in the wrong direction that’s where they will go. They will sprint there faster than you can go. This is ok, its one of their advantages, they can give you signal quick. Remember if they are off in the wrong direction more research and planning is needed, and maybe a little bit more thinking on your end to steer them in the right direction.

Thinking about AI productivity again. It’s allowing massive amounts of work to get done, to levels that humans cannot physically type out in some cases. But not all of this work is necessarily high value work. Right now I’m working on one of the biggest PRs to an internal cli library. Probably the largest PR I’ve ever done professionally. It touches all of the cli, refactors every command, reaches into the business logic layers to drive deeper separation. I reaches into the common layers to drive consistency. It ensures that every command (50 or so) has similar flags, supports –plain, –no-color. It specs out contracts to ensure that data goes out stdout, any extra goes out stderr. This makes everything unix pipe friendly. There was quite a bit of research and prep that went in, that turns out to already be distilled down into clig.dev. The point is that this is all good work. It will make the product consistent, repeatable, expected, and most of all boring. Most of the time, it will just work. Since we did it ahead of a lot of other agentic work on the product its establishing good patterns for the product moving forward. But its low value work. We wouldn’t have likely put humans on this work wholesale and fixed critical paths as they came up. Its not cutting cost, selling more product, or driving critical business decisions. Yes it’s worth it now, but it would not have bee in the past.