The best engineers I know never talk about their AI setup. The worst engineers I know only talk about their AI setup.
The folks you hear talking about their agent orchestration frameworks and skills.md this and agent.md that are like the vim shortcuts and emacs org-mode nerds of old: not doing the work.
As an author, I'm a big fan of productive procrastination.
The kitchen is cleanest and your laundry most folded when a book deadline is due. I learned all my best IDE shortcuts doing annoying tasks I wasn't quite sure how to tackle :)
Same is true for productivity systems, claude code orchestrations, note taking palaces, and everything else that feels productive but gets nothing done.
Jeff Atwood had a great post about this 15 years ago: You don't need an elaborate system. Stop wasting time on TODO apps. What are your top 3 priorities today? Do those.
The goal of engineering is to get us over the water. Everything else is fluff.
Yes choosing the right framework helps. Picking a good language is great. Getting your AI just so is fantastic. Watching it work feels great. Look at all that text! It's doing so much 😍
And nobody cares. What did you get done [name|]? What shipped to prod today? What new thing can our users do thanks to your work?
That's it. Don't give me a bunch of markdown files and documentation sitting on a server. Ship code. Make it work.
As they say in Moneyball: Does he get on base? That's all we need.
Outcomes over outputs.
A doc is not an outcome. Writing the doc might be! You, you personally learned details about the problem, detangled requirements, and figured shit out. The doc is an output (that nobody will read), the change in your perspective is the outcome.
Your goal is to ship. The rest is fluff.
Cheers,
~Swizec
PS: making a plan is not enough, you still have to do the plan. Yes it's great that Claude rewrote the 2 sentence ticket into 5 different plans and 600 words across 30,000 tokens, incinerated a small amazonian forest and cost the company $0.30 but where's my feature? What can the user do today that they couldn't do yesterday?
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