Everything All At Once: AI & Intentionality
Part of a series
- AI-Assisted Engineering Series (19 of 19)
This started as a timeline entry at the end of a busy Saturday, and grew into this post.
By the evening there were about 85 commits across six repos. Every tmux window had an agent chain working at the same time (one main agent I talk to, a secondary that coordinates and a worker that implements, each in its own pane). In one day:
- Skills: my skills moved into their own public repo and went from v1.0.0 to v1.2.0.
- Vision Pro: a stutter fix became a post and a skill.
- tmux-agents: tmux-agents shipped twice, v1.19.0 and v1.20.0.
- Dotfiles: caught up with all of the above.
- EDControlRoom: a few late-night ideas for EDControlRoom.
- This blog: the Vision Pro post, its diagrams and illustrations, a new Gaming series and a stack of timeline entries.
With AI, it almost feels like you can do anything. I could never have dreamed of working on three, four, even five projects at once. But ever since AI became this capable, I've found myself working like this every now and then. It feels less like coding and more like running a small studio. Tiring, but the good kind of tired.
But two things kept coming up.
The bottleneck is still my brain
The agents can run everything. I can't hold everything in my mushy human brain.
My brain has a context window too (don't ask me how many tokens that is 😆), and it's a lot smaller than the whole fleet of agents combined, of course. Quite a few times today (and on other days too), I hopped from one project to another and had to ask the agent to catch me up. Not on someone else's work. On a change I had asked for, an hour earlier. Stupid human brain, forgetting things that fast.
Other times I asked for a summary of a big design change instead of reviewing it. These are personal projects, I was pushing hard, and there was no time to read everything. There's always one more thing I could be doing at the same time.
Even this post started that way. At the end of the day I asked an agent to go through every repo's commits and tell me what I'd done today.
Agents get memory files, handoff notes and wrap-ups before a session is cleared. I wish I had the same thing for myself. Right now, the agents are mine.
And if I'm not pushing this hard, I can go over things at a more relaxed pace and take my time to think slowly through decisions. That's the careful end of the spectrum in The Two Extremes of AI-Assisted Engineering.
Intentionality: something we are slowly giving away
And that leads back to the question I keep coming back to: was I spending that time and energy intentionally?
I did decide a lot today: what to ship, what to cut, which image, when to push. But I also gave the agents a lot of room to decide for me. Sometimes I didn't have the energy. Sometimes I couldn't be bothered. Sometimes I just didn't mind.
That's a trade-off, and it's fine, as long as you, the one deciding, are okay with it.
But asking an agent to remind me what I asked for is a small signal. If I can't remember a decision an hour later, how much of a decision was it? Some of the time, I wasn't really there when it was made.
I think this is what AI is quietly taking away from us: intentionality. When you can do everything at once, it gets easier to stop asking whether you meant to. There's less of it than there used to be.
What I want to keep
I want to notice when that happens. And when I have the energy to give, I want to be more intentional myself.
AI gives me more capacity than I've ever had. But capacity isn't direction. Being able to open a fifth window doesn't mean I should, and the agents won't ask me that question. It has to come from me.
So some days I'll still push hard, with agents in every window, and that's fine when I choose it. On other days I want to pick one or two things on purpose, stay with them long enough to remember why I made each call, and let the rest wait. The things I can't get to today will still be there tomorrow, and so will the agents.
Maybe slowing down once in a while isn't such a bad idea either.