Recap

We're three years into a five-hundred-year skill. About 1200 ELO. When the model lets you down, the closed-minded blame the AI; the open-minded ask what they could have done differently. The second is the faster path — by a lot.

When the output disappoints, walk the four levers. Better tool. Better model. Better prompt. Better context. The biggest lever is almost always context.

Eight moves worth practicing —

• What questions should you ask me before starting?
• What's the smallest version of this that ships?
• Give me 3 options, rank them, name the trade-offs.
• Argue against your last suggestion.
• What did you skip?
• How would a senior engineer review this?
• Match the style of components/PostCard.tsx.
• Update CLAUDE.md with what you just learned.

Every change lives somewhere on a 2D map: breadth (which area of code) × depth (how zoomed in). At any node, three moves: ask, plan, delegate. Most non-trivial work moves through all three.

Treat the agent as a colleague — a fast, knowledgeable junior senior who only sees what you've shown them. The discipline gets more important, not less, as the models get smarter.

One agent makes you faster — but now you have access to a whole team. The bottleneck stops being model speed and becomes you: how well you can brief them, unblock them, and manage several at once. Optimize the hour, not the message.