First, start with prompting for behaviour.

Second, what else to include?

1. Strong preferences for the task at hand:
   • Say use shadcn/ui for the dialog
   • Or state must go through the central store
   • Or use plain sql for complex queries
   • Or don't add any db fields
   • Or this should be a db field
2. Hunches and make it sound like they are:
   • Like, I think this has to do with xyz
   • Or I'm sure there's prior knowledge of this
   • Or do we already have a version of this? Investigate
   • Or we should probably add an integration test for this? Wdyt?
   • Or can we abstract and reuse the comments code in Post.rb? Wdyt?
3. Questions
   • Ask eli5 how we handle publishing posts
   • Or summarize the admin auth
   • Or review @docs/add-comments.md. Focus on simplification and removing complexity
   • Or can we skip the middle step here or would that be worse for users?

We used to discover the details as we went along with the implementation. For agentic coding you want to speed-run this, assisted by the agent, before you let it rip.

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.

– Abraham Lincoln
  – Mikkel Malmberg

Here’s a tip for your agentic coding:

Don’t prompt for the thing you want, prompt for behaviour.

Say you need to add authentication. So many details are missing: What kind of auth? How strict? What does it look like? Where does it lead to? Where does it end?

The agent needs context. It has some, can figure out some more. But you, the builder, have most if not all of it. Plus your preferences. Plus your intuition. What needs to happen is telepathic transfer from you to the agent.

The agent is so eager to start working. It is trained for action. Like a junior dev refactoring billing on their first day, it will gladly run amok before you can even type design doc.

So be deliberate about how you want it to act.

You don’t have to spend a day writing a perfect spec. Use the agent’s eagerness to your advantage. Let it do the typing. Instead, short prompts for behaviour:

• Say, plan authentication with me.
• And ask me questions to align.
• And investigate best practices for oauth.
• And discuss the pros/cons of magic links.
• Say write our plan to an .md file in docs/

Then, finally, when the context is primed like a stretched bow and arrow: implement @docs/auth-plan.md.

This makes sure the agent doesn’t run like a mad man, 100 km/hour in the wrong direction.

You may not know what the final result should look like. You might not know which details to include. But your intuition does. So help the agent help you both first, then let it run like the wind.

defaults write com.apple.WindowManager EnableTilingByEdgeDrag -int 0;

To enable it again:

defaults write com.apple.WindowManager EnableTilingByEdgeDrag -int 1;

From my AMA:

Hi Mikkel. Just finished watching The great crypto scam with James Jani. I have previously (Kortsluttet) heard you talk positively about the possibilities of block chain technology. Are you still optimistic about the potential now or do you share some of his concerns, that it is mostly utilized as a pyramid scheme to make early adopters rich.

I’m quite involved now in the digital collectible scene, AKA NFTs, and I hold some crypto, mainly $ETH that I’ve made from selling and helping others sell NFTs. So take my opinion with that in mind.

I don’t see crypto, Ethereum at least, as a pyramid scheme. There have definitely been folks who’ve been rewarded solely by being first but that is also true in start-up investing or real estate or whatever else people invest in. There’s always risk and then sometimes there’s a reward for taking on that risk.

I like how NFTs allow me to collect art directly from artists. I support them in their creative endeavours and I get to call some pieces mine. Whether you think this form of ownership is even a thing (I CAN JUST RIGHT-CLICK SAVE AS?!) is up to you but it is meaningful to me.

I think the last 10 years have shown us that if we want to live increasingly larger parts of our lives online, we need somewhere to live. Huge corporations and their Social Media products were easy to move into as they had the means to pay thousands of talented people to build very easy to use and welcoming machines. But the rent was paid with attention and privacy and, on Facebook democracy, and recently on Twitter with our dignity.

So we need something else. Public blockchains provide a solution to the problem of where do we put all the stuff?! Just think of them as a database that no one owns. It’s slow and expensive and cumbersome. But no one owns it. So no one can fiddle with the data. No one can decide to sell your data against your will. No one can tell you, you have to use their app, because there’s no moat around the data.

There are a few other decentralisation efforts that don’t include the whole money aspect so prominently, like Holepunch or Scuttlebutt. They’re very interesting as well.

I don’t think Bitcoin will replace the dollar. I’m not sure it’s a good investment to buy any crypto at any point. Well, it would’ve been 6 years ago and wouldn’t 1 year ago. But who knows where prices go from here. I’m not too interested in that aspect (I mean, if the $ETH price goes to a million USD and I become generationally rich, I won’t complain.)