thoughts: Everything at once, and how much of it I meant

Today was a busy one. Every tmux window had an agent chain working at the same time, and by the evening there were about 85 commits across six repos.

• My skills went public. I moved them out of my dotfiles into their own repo, TheClooneyCollection/skills. You can install them as a Claude Code or Codex plugin, or with npx skills. v1.0.0 went out in the morning and v1.2.0 by the evening. Along the way I added three new skills, and every skill got a README and a one-line reason for existing.
• A stutter fix became a post and a skill. ALVR on my Vision Pro kept stuttering. It came down to AWDL channel hopping, and moving the router's primary channel to 44 fixed it. That turned into a post, a skill, and a new Gaming series.
• Illustrating the post became a skill too. Claude drew the diagrams, Codex generated illustrations in three different styles, and I picked from one gallery page. That's illustrate-post now.
• tmux-agents shipped twice. v1.19.0 and v1.20.0, then a design doc in the afternoon about how it tracks what each agent is doing.
• The rest kept moving. My dotfiles caught up with all of the above, and EDControlRoom got a few late-night ideas.

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 I keep coming back to one question: 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. (I wrote more about where that line sits in The Two Extremes of AI-Assisted Engineering.)

That's a trade-off, and it's fine, as long as you, the one deciding, are okay with it.

Still, 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.

I want to notice when that happens. And when I have the energy to give, I want to be more intentional myself. Maybe slowing down once in a while isn't such a bad idea either.

This grew into a post: Everything All At Once: AI & Intentionality.