You can just ask AI to do things

One of the most important skills in working with AI is agency: being willing to try new and ambitious things. This is true for what you build, but it’s also true for how you build. AI models are improving so quickly that most of us are bottlenecked1 on noticing that AI agents can help automate particular tasks. Here are some examples of that from my daily work. Asking the agent to run my dev server. Agents are very good at fixing weird dev environment issues because they work fast, have infinite patience, and have a huge breadth of knowledge. I almost never run the bash commands to start my dev server anymore. Asking the agent to make requests to my dev server. Part of why I don’t run my dev server manually is that I don’t make requests to it manually either. Instead I’ll say “okay, now start the dev server and run through the happy paths with curl”. The relatively manual process of assembling a set of curl requests and validating the output can now be entirely automated2. Asking the…