Friday, 24th October 2025
A lot of people say AI will make us all "managers" or "editors"...but I think this is a dangerously incomplete view!
Personally, I'm trying to code like a surgeon.
A surgeon isn't a manager, they do the actual work! But their skills and time are highly leveraged with a support team that handles prep, secondary tasks, admin. The surgeon focuses on the important stuff they are uniquely good at. [...]
It turns out there are a LOT of secondary tasks which AI agents are now good enough to help out with. Some things I'm finding useful to hand off these days:
- Before attempting a big task, write a guide to relevant areas of the codebase
- Spike out an attempt at a big change. Often I won't use the result but I'll review it as a sketch of where to go
- Fix typescript errors or bugs which have a clear specification
- Write documentation about what I'm building
I often find it useful to run these secondary tasks async in the background -- while I'm eating lunch, or even literally overnight!
When I sit down for a work session, I want to feel like a surgeon walking into a prepped operating room. Everything is ready for me to do what I'm good at.
— Geoffrey Litt, channeling The Mythical Man-Month
claude_code_docs_map.md. Something I'm enjoying about Claude Code is that any time you ask it questions about itself it runs tool calls like these:
In this case I'd asked it about its "hooks" feature.
The claude_code_docs_map.md file is a neat Markdown index of all of their other documentation - the same pattern advocated by llms.txt. Claude Code can then fetch further documentation to help it answer your question.
I intercepted the current Claude Code system prompt using this trick and sure enough it included a note about this URL:
When the user directly asks about Claude Code (eg. "can Claude Code do...", "does Claude Code have..."), or asks in second person (eg. "are you able...", "can you do..."), or asks how to use a specific Claude Code feature (eg. implement a hook, or write a slash command), use the WebFetch tool to gather information to answer the question from Claude Code docs. The list of available docs is available at https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/claude_code_docs_map.md.
I wish other LLM products - including both ChatGPT and Claude.ai themselves - would implement a similar pattern. It's infuriating how bad LLM tools are at answering questions about themselves, though unsurprising given that their model's training data pre-dates the latest version of those tools.