Chris Dzombak • Public Bookmarks

“what got me here won’t get me where I need to be next”

“The more my system grew, the more I deferred the work of thought to some future self who would sort, tag, distill, and extract the gold. That self never arrived.”

“The act of deletion is not a failure of recordkeeping. It is a reassertion of agency.”

Each coding session became its own contained exploration:

Start fresh: New directory of docs in a new git branch

Write a spec.md: A couple hundred words of "here's what I actually want"

Get a plan.md: Ask the AI to turn my vague intentions into concrete steps

Iterate on the plan: Edit it, have the AI critique it, answer questions, repeat until it's actually coherent

Let the agent loose: "Okay, enact the plan"—or, sometimes "Make it so"

Babysit appropriately: Review the code as it emerges, redirect when it goes off the rails

Wrap up with notes.md: Have the AI reflect on what we built and what we learned