Code Like a Surgeon

Summary

A lot of people say AI will make us all “managers” or “editors”…but I think this is a dangerously incomplete view! 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.) It turns out there are a LOT of secondary tasks which AI agents are now good enough to help out with. 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 Fix typescript errors or bugs which have a clear specification Write documentation about what I’m building I often find it useful to run these secondary tasks async in the background – while I’m eating lunch, or even literally overnight! When I sit down for a work session, I want to feel like a surgeon walking into a prepped operating room. Everything is ready for me to do what I’m good at. Mind the autonomy slider Notably, there is a huge difference between how I use AI for primary vs secondary tasks. For the core design prototyping work, I still do a lot of coding by hand, and when I do use AI, I’m more careful and in the details. I need fast feedback loops and good visibility. (eg, I like Cursor tab-complete here) Whereas for secondary tasks, I’m much much looser with it, happy to let an agent churn for hours in the background. The ability to get the job done eventually is the most important thing; speed and visibility matter less. Claude Code has been my go-to for long unsupervised sessions but Codex CLI is becoming a strong contender there too, possibly my new favorite. The...