Simon Willison’s Weblog

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