Code like a surgeon

"Personally, I'm trying to code like a surgeon. A surgeon isn't a manager, they do the actual work! But their skills and time are highly leveraged with a support team that handles prep, secondary tasks, admin. The surgeon focuses on the important stuff they are uniquely good at. My current goal with AI coding tools is to spend 100% of my time doing stuff that matters. (As a UI prototyper, that mostly means tinkering with design concepts.)"

"Some things I'm finding useful to hand off these days: Before attempting a big task, write a guide to relevant areas of the codebase Spike out an attempt at a big change. Often I won't use the result but I'll review it as a sketch of where to go I often find it useful to run these secondary tasks async in the background - while I'm eating lunch, or even literally overnight!"

Adopt a surgeon-like approach to coding: concentrate on unique, high-value work while delegating preparation, secondary tasks, and admin to AI agents. AI can create code sketches, fix clear TypeScript errors, generate documentation, and write guides to relevant codebase areas. Run many secondary tasks asynchronously, allowing agents to churn during breaks or overnight. Reserve careful, high-visibility AI use for core design and prototyping to preserve fast feedback loops. Adjust autonomy per task: low autonomy for primary creative work and high autonomy for background chores. Claude Code and Codex CLI are useful for long unsupervised runs.

Read at Geoffreylitt