21–30 of 233 posts
I could care less about bot sitting (haven’t we always written our own automation?), but it’s botsitting the unverified slop that people send you that fuels frustration. I thought I worked with competent people who respected me
I've found that setting good guardrails, and running in a sandbox so that the agent doesn't keep asking tedious permission questions, makes things go a LOT smoother. Generally, I spend anywhere between 15 mins and an hour setting things up (depending on how well the project is set up for AI work), and then set the agent going, coming back in a half-hour to an hour to check its progress. Generally, the tooling keeps i…
It doesn't change the premise. AI should be assisting us, instead it's doing the job and it's us being an assistant to it. This is a monumental shift that people seem to be missing in how knowledge working is changing and it's going beyond mere coding. Guardrails, prompts, whatever, it's us helping it doing the job, not the other way around. Opus 4.6 was the last genuinely good assistant LLM, but since then it's quit…
To me, this feels in many ways like a technical manager or team lead's job, where I guide the process along using my knowledge and experience, and then let the agent fill in the rest (to the best of its ability).
The agent can't really learn from its mistakes (at least, not without consuming precious context), so I apply a blameless postmortem process, updating the guardrails whenever it goes astray in the same way more than once.
And really, I'd rather be contemplating the more difficult and interesting questions of architecture, environment, ergonomics and market fit, so it suits me fine.
I've found that setting good guardrails, and running in a sandbox so that the agent doesn't keep asking tedious permission questions, makes things go a LOT smoother. Generally, I spend anywhere between 15 mins and an hour setting things up (depending on how well the project is set up for AI work), and then set the agent going, coming back in a half-hour to an hour to check its progress. Generally, the tooling keeps i…
> 80% of the questions the agent asks me require a lot of thought. 20% of what it does needs correction.
I've found even the permissions questions give me veto power over fruitless lines of exploration, especially in planning mode. For instance, it wants to use tools I don't have installed to access information that I have made available elsewhere? I get a chance to override this decision by declining the permissions check and redirecting it. Feels tedious, but helps me understand what information sources are influencing it. I head off a lot of bugs this way.
as a boss (or researcher) i'm going to measure productivity based on amount of output per hour that i'm paying you; as a workers, i'm going to measure productivity based on amount of output relative to the amount of effort i'm putting in.
so what may be happening is that bosses see that output is at 80% (productivity down!) but workers see that they can give that 80% output with 40% effort (productivity up!).
I've found that setting good guardrails, and running in a sandbox so that the agent doesn't keep asking tedious permission questions, makes things go a LOT smoother. Generally, I spend anywhere between 15 mins and an hour setting things up (depending on how well the project is set up for AI work), and then set the agent going, coming back in a half-hour to an hour to check its progress. Generally, the tooling keeps i…
> sandbox so that the agent doesn't keep asking tedious permission questions > 80% of the questions the agent asks me require a lot of thought. 20% of what it does needs correction. I've found even the permissions questions give me veto power over fruitless lines of exploration, especially in planning mode. For instance, it wants to use tools I don't have installed to access information that I have made available els…
I spend at least 6 hours a week arguing with bots owned by other teams, as I’m unable to reach a human before I bypass their bot. 10k person company, clients are paying for my time.
I spend at least 6 hours a week arguing with bots owned by other teams, as I’m unable to reach a human before I bypass their bot. 10k person company, clients are paying for my time.
I spend at least 6 hours a week arguing with bots owned by other teams, as I’m unable to reach a human before I bypass their bot. 10k person company, clients are paying for my time.
It may be that they’re protecting their time.