We Should Be More Tired Than the Model

In a post about slowing down our agent use deliberately to increase quality and understanding Vicki links to Nolan Lawson’s Using AI to write better code more slowly:

If you’re the kind of developer who uses agents to write multi-hundred-line PRs that you barely understand yourself, I’d invite you to slow down a bit and try this other, slower style of “vibe coding.” Ask an agent how your PR works and how it might fail. Have it write Markdown docs with Mermaid charts if necessary. Use Matt Pocock’s /grill-me skill until you understand the entire PR front-to-back.

You might not be more “productive” in terms of raw lines of code. You might burn a ton of tokens just to find out that your entire plan was wrongheaded from the start. But I find this style of coding to be a more super-powered version of the kind of programming I was already trying to do before LLMs: careful, methodical, quality-obsessed, focused on making things better for the next coder.

So take a deep breath, slow down, try this technique, and see if you don’t enjoy writing better code more slowly.

Vicki concludes:

All of these negate the supposed speed up effects of LLM-generated code in the short-term by adding friction, and yet, in the longer term, make me better at using the tool, because they solidify my own foundation instead of the foundation models’.

We should be more tired than the model.

We should be more tired than the model. When I saw the post in my feed I thought I misread the title (or maybe it was a typo). But after reading it I realized that’s already where I’ve been heading organically myself. I went through my “look how fast I can go weeeeee!” era pretty quickly. While it was fun (check out all these side projects!) it was not just exhausting, I also found myself understanding less and less of what I was doing (which sucks all the fun out of the work anyway).

So I’ve been slowing down as well. Reading and editing even more than before. Challenging the agent for longer. Taking the time to close loops to update skills/context documents before moving on to the next thing. Never skipping the “let’s write a design doc and implementation plan together” step.

I do think I am more tired than the model these days. But I also understand and learn more, which not only improves the quality of the output now, but also makes it better tomorrow. I think the speed trade-off is worth it.