We're all bottlenecks now

our agents need you.

Leave them to their own devices and they go off the rails pretty fast – maybe tomorrow’s models won’t, but today’s need periodic infusions of the taste, values, and common sense that only you can provide.

That means, you’re the bottleneck. Billions of tokens are out there, pressing against the dam, waiting to be turned into valuable software, and the only thing stopping them is that they have to trickle through you first. So, open up wide.

Many have noted one consequence of this: all the 9-9-6ing. But there’s another consequence, too: a customization craze.

Customizing is in again

Take tmux. Used to be this niche thing. You had maybe 6 hipsters in your 500-person org’s #tmux-users Slack channel. Now, it’s mainstream. It’ll be in like 30% of the “level up your Claude” tutorials. If you wish to remain a hipster, go find “cmux” or something more obscure.

Multiplexers are just the surface: you’ve gotta customize your agent harness, you’ve gotta try out all the different coding models, you’ve gotta have a custom CLAUDE.md, custom skills, custom hooks, a looping construct, personal evals. Better try out “caveman” and “rtk” to save tokens. Better design personas for your agent teams.

Back in my day, if you spent an afternoon setting up vim plugins, this was the sort of thing you spoke about with a twinge of guilt behind your cheery grin. Now the tables have turned. My colleagues using the stock-standard setups they haven’t customized in months are the ones with the apologetic smiles. My new skip-level manager on day 2 of his reign: “you guys better be trying out pi, [the agent harness framework], I’m not going to make you, but…”

This makes sense. Again, your agents need you. They are desperate for the human taste, human values, and human common sense that only you can synthesize and secrete. Why wouldn’t you try and create the conditions that are singularly ideal for you? Especially now tweaking your environment requires a mere prompt, little more than breath.

This is all to the good, I think. I have long yearned for the return of “personal” to “personal computing”¹.

Unicycles for the mind

In my unicycles post I wrote²

The critical resource is not developer time, it’s developer energy. The “10x developer” may or may not be a myth, but it is no myth that I personally am 10x more productive on days when I am energized than on days when I am exhausted, distracted, and frustrated.

What this means is – yes, vibe-code your own personal workshop, grow your own skill garden. But don’t just stop at done. Actually make it good. Invest more than you think you should. The quality bar is higher for tools that save you energy than for tools that merely save you time. And if your personal tools are slop and you’re always hitting frustrating paper cuts, because you did the 80% that your agent could one-shot and neglected the final 20% that takes more care, your tools will bring you joy and energy for exactly as long as it takes for the novelty to wear off.

In my opinion, if you don’t feel just a little bit guilty about the effort you’re putting into these things, you’re not doing it right.