🌰 focus in an agentic age

As a software engineer, LLM-use is non-negotiable at work. When I wrote 🌰 loot boxes, casinos, and work chat, Slack was the “Instagram for work”: the loot box of notifications winning against the Type-2-fun of deep, single-minded focus.

LLM agents exasperbate the loot box effect:

• I must refresh to find out if it finished early or got stuck midway through
• The agent is doing the building. The building is what matters. Unblock the agent ASAP.
• The agent has produced 3000 words and 12 PRs. It would take sustained focus to review all this. Or…I could trust the agents reviewing the code & all the unit tests we have now, sign off on whatever this is, and find another shiny thing to tell an agent to do.

People tell me that the job is now “babysitting agents” but that doesn’t feel right. When I take the time to deeply understand what the agents are doing, I often catch simplifications and corrections. But I struggle to justify making the time and, frankly, struggle to focus during that time. The time spent understanding a simple change feels outsized compared to the change itself.

I’m thinking now about making the changes easier to understand: generated design docs, small PRs that I review before bundling into a larger PR for others to review, automated persona audits, automated browser tests via agent-driven browser extensions. But what I haven’t quite answered is where I can provide the most value. The software engineer of yore was penalized for not spending enough time writing code. We could simply raise the bar: 20 PRs per week instead of a previous 2-4. But there is limited value to building fast. Building the right thing may be even more important than before.

I want to hear what you think:

• How do you think about focus at your job?
• What have you identified as the most valuable use of your time now that computers write most (if not all) of the code?

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Every post on this blog is a work in progress. Phrasing may be less than ideal, ideas may not yet be fully thought through. Thank you for watching me grow.