Productivity Fundamentals AI Can’t Automate
Productivity after AI is less about typing and more about these 4 principles
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Last week, reading a pretty old book about software engineers’ productivity.
It felt like the author was living in the dinosaurs’ era. Typing code by hand, getting crazy about some macros and scripts for small automations.
All of the things that were great productivity improvements at the time just became outdated. The bar was raised way higher than that.
But those tools were only the means to an end. And that end was some productivity fundamentals that are still present. Knowing them will help you become really productive with AI, instead of being as average as everyone else using those tools.
Let’s learn the 4 principles for software engineers’ productivity.
Acceleration
Acceleration is about reducing the time between your intent and the verified result. In the old days, when writing code, if you intended to write a function and a type checker flagged errors in your code while you were typing, you got much faster at typing correct code.
Now with AI we’re not writing our own code. We’re not even building and checking our own code. I’m just telling the AI to send some curls and “gimme a report of the results”.
However, just imagine that you’re one of those people who require approval for each shell command the AI wants to run. You’d be increasing the steps to get to working code too much. It’d be faster to write it yourself.
So the principle of acceleration is all about tuning your workflow steps in order to be just one prompt away from having working code.
Note: I wouldn’t consider a workflow faster or slower depending on how much time it takes. I’d consider the workflow “accelerated” if it works without me having to be on top of it. The point is about reducing interactions with the computer needed to make something happen.
Focus
Focus is a hard one. I’m multiplexing a lot of agents running in parallel nowadays, which means that my attention is fragmented. And I was told by all productivity books that switching between tasks, getting notifications, and interruptions were the enemy of focus.
The book has this same understanding of focus: Reduce notifications, close windows you’re not using, search instead of using navigation...
So based on this definition, I should work with a single AI agent.
But regarding the principle of Acceleration, the point is that I can one-shot the results I want with a single prompt. It means that in an ideal world, I want a single interaction to complete a task.
So what if focus isn’t about “work in 1 task”, but about “work in one project”?