The feed

I keep finding the same thing: excellent outcomes from agent work require four basic characteristics.

1. Curiosity. When I’m in doubt or uncertain, I ask the agent. What happened? What’s off? What does it see that I don’t?
2. Patience. Things will fail and break. When they do, I return to #1 until they don’t.
3. Attention to detail. I click through the work closely enough to notice what feels off.
4. Critical thought. I reason through why it’s off and how to resolve it - with #1, of course.

Attention to detail and critical thought are the critical path. One catches the issue; the other makes sense of it. Curiosity helps me resolve it.

There are skills and best practices to working with AI. I still find that every one I’ve learned is mediated through these four characteristics.

If I hit a ceiling or get super frustrated with agentic work, I check which of the four is lagging and go self-resource it.

Working with agents creates a granular fragmentation of work. Each agent carries a small stream forward, but I still carry the map of all of them.

Cycling agent tabs in Claude Code or Codex requires rapid context switching: remembering what each agent is doing, what changed, which decision is waiting on me, and where to return next. The work includes directing agents and mentally tracking multiple concurrent streams without dropping one.

That’s a very particular skill set. It’s trainable, but it isn’t intuitive.

If my agents fail, first I need to check if I’ve set them up for success.

And when they do fail, I add new guardrails + evals to make sure it doesn’t happen again and I catch it if it does.