Most of the conversation around agents is still about making more, faster.

I’m more interested in something slower: teaching my own agents how I work, so I can stay close to more of the work without lowering the bar.

That’s the idea I’m interested in: reach without dilution.

Yesterday I watched a great presentation by @poteto where they compared building a team of agents to running an engineering team. That analogy stuck with me.

A team doesn’t become autonomous because you keep handing people tasks. In my experience leading teams, people gradually absorb what the work is for, what good looks like, and what you refuse to compromise on. They understand not just what you want, but why.

Looking through pstack, what struck me wasn’t really the automation. It was seeing one person’s way of building made explicit enough for an agent to actually use.

This is also why I’m skeptical of blindly downloading someone else’s giant pile of skills, pretending it’ll just work, and calling it a day.

The interesting part of /poteto-mode isn’t the pile of skills. It’s the work behind it: someone gradually making their instincts, standards, and way of building understandable to agents.

Borrowing those skills can help. But using them as a substitute for figuring out my own way of working? Not super inspiring.

That work is slow, but it compounds.

I have a bad habit of thinking I need to do everything myself. Partly because doing the work is satisfying. Partly because the sense of progression is addictive. And partly because every handoff feels like something might get lost.

Most of the time I know pretty clearly what I want to make. The problem is the hundred small obstacles between the idea and the thing. They eat attention. Sometimes I end up making the idea smaller or lowering the bar simply because I can’t hold everything at once.

Maybe the real constraint isn’t output. It’s how much of the work I can stay close enough to care about.

That’s why I don’t want agents to detach me from the work and manufacture more stuff. It’s literally the opposite.

I’m interested in whether they can remove some of that friction without pulling me away from the decisions and details I care about.

I don’t really think of them as minions. More like partners I’m gradually teaching how to work with me.

The funny thing is, teaching them forces me to understand myself better too.

Things that used to live vaguely in my head suddenly need words. I have to explain why something feels wrong, why one choice is better, and where the quality bar actually is. In doing that, I end up questioning and sharpening my own taste.

I have no interest in shipping more slop faster. I’d rather ship less, with more ambition and care, while being able to shape parts of the work I simply couldn’t reach before.

None of this happens overnight. I get things wrong, correct them, and try again. Eventually, hopefully, they start getting more of what I mean without me having to explain every little thing.

Maybe that’s the promise of agents I’m most excited about: more room to be ambitious about the things only I would make, while the work still feels like mine.