The best automation is the script you wrote once and forgot about. Until you realize you’d be miserable without it. That’s the bar I hold every workflow script to: will this save me more time than it took to write? Most “productivity automation” content you find online fails that test. The scripts look clever in a conference talk, end up in your dotfiles, and collect dust. They solve hypothetical problems, not real ones. ...
This post continues “The Centaur’s Toolkit” series on practical human-AI collaboration in technical work. The error showed up in production on a Wednesday afternoon. sqlalchemy.exc.OperationalError: (psycopg2.OperationalError) SSL SYSCALL error: EOF detected I knew this error. Or thought I did. Stack Overflow had dozens of answers: upgrade psycopg2, check your SSL certificates, adjust your connection timeout. I’d even hit this error two years earlier on a different project, and the fix had been a connection pool configuration change. ...
This is Part 5 of “The Centaur’s Toolkit” series, where we explore practical strategies for human-AI collaboration in technical work. A new AI coding tool launches every week. Actually, that’s an understatement. Multiple tools launch every week, each promising to revolutionize your workflow. Each one has a Twitter thread explaining why it’s better than what you’re using now. If you tried to evaluate every new tool, you’d never write any code. ...
This is Part 4 of “The Centaur’s Toolkit” series, where we explore practical strategies for human-AI collaboration in technical work. Code review is one of those practices everyone agrees is important and almost nobody enjoys. You’re deep in your own work when a PR notification arrives. You context-switch, try to understand someone else’s mental model, and attempt to provide useful feedback before the next interruption hits. It’s mentally draining. And honestly, most reviews end up being superficial because thorough review takes time nobody has. ...
This is Part 1 of “The Centaur’s Toolkit” series, where we explore practical strategies for human-AI collaboration in technical work. You’ve been using GitHub Copilot for six months. Or maybe it’s Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor. The tab key has become your best friend. Boilerplate code that used to take twenty minutes now takes two. You feel faster. More productive. Like a coding superhero. But lately, something feels off. You catch yourself accepting suggestions without really reading them. You accept a function completion and realize you’re not entirely sure what it does. Yesterday, you spent an hour debugging code that the AI wrote, code you wouldn’t have written that way yourself. ...