In my last post about saying goodbye to coding, I wrote that I have not found how to stay in the zone in this new world. I feel my attention fragmented.
Since then, I have gained some ideas for how to get back into the zone.
Jamon Holmgren has an article about his “night shift” agentic workflow. It’s worth a read. The gist is that he spends his day on specs and high-leverage human work. He lets the agents work at night.
These ideas also seem to parallel ideas around the agentic “software factory.”
I’m going to try some new ways of working with agents, and I’ll let you know in a later post how it’s going.
In general, I have a feeling that if our society’s adoption of agents involves increasingly fragmented attention, it will not be good for our mental health. It seems to me that, even with AI on the scene, we still want to be doing what Cal Newport calls deep work.
It also occurred to me recently that I have always loved sketching notes and diagrams on paper. I could take advantage of how easy it is for an LLM to clean up my sketches and notes, and do some work offline with a pen and paper (or a whiteboard marker).