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Comment by chatmasta

1 day ago

All I want is for my agent to save me time, and to become a _compounding_ multiplier for my output. As a PM, I mostly want to use it for demos and prototypes and ideation. And I need it to work with my fractured attention span and saturated meeting schedule, so compounding is critical.

I’m still new to this, but the first obvious inefficiency I see is that I’m repeating context between sessions, copying .md files around, and generally not gaining any efficiency between each interaction. My only priority right now is to eliminate this repetition so I can free up buffer space for the next repetition to be eliminated. And I don’t want to put any effort into this.

How are you guys organizing this sort of compounding context bank? I’m talking about basic information like “this is my job, these are the products I own, here’s the most recent docs about them, here’s how you use them, etc.” I would love to point it to a few public docs sites and be done, but that’s not the reality of PM work on relatively new/instable products. I’ve got all sorts of docs, some duplicated, some outdated, some seemingly important but actually totally wrong… I can’t just point the agent at my whole Drive and ask it to understand me.

Should I tell my agent to create or update a Skill file every time I find myself repeating the same context more than twice? Should I put the effort into gathering all the best quality docs into a single Drive folder and point it there? Should I make some hooks to update these files when new context appears?

It's too early. People are trying all of the above. I use all of the above, specifically:

- A well-structured folder of markdown files that I constantly garden. Every sub-folder has a README. Every files has metadata in front-matter. I point new sessions at the entry point to this documentation. Constantly run agents that clean up dead references, update out of date information, etc. Build scripts that deterministically find broken links. It's an ongoing battle.

- A "continuation prompt" skill, that prompts the agent to collect all relevant context for another agent to continue

- Judicious usage of "memory"

- Structured systems made out of skills like GSD (Get Shit Done)

- Systems of "quality gate" hooks and test harnesses

For all of these, I have the agent set them up and manage them, but I've yet to find a context-management system that just works. I don't think we understand the "physics" of context management yet.

  • On your first point, one unexpected side effect I’ve noticed is that in an effort to offload my thinking to an agent, I often end up just doing the thinking myself. It’s a surprisingly effective antidote to writer’s block… a similar effect to journaling, and a good reason why people feel weird about sharing their prompts.

The best thing you can do is help build and maintain high quality docs.

Great docs help you, your agents, your team and your customers.

If you’re confused and the agent can’t figure it out reliably how can anyone?

Easier said than done of course. And harder now than ever if the products are rapidly changing from agentic coding too.

One of my only universal AGENTS.md rules is:

> Write the pull request title and description as customer facing release notes.

  • I’ve been thinking about this a lot. It’s obviously the ideal state of things. The challenge is that we’ve got existing docs frameworks and teams and inertia and unreleased features… and I don’t have time to wait for that when I’m trying to get something done today. Not to mention the trade off of writing in public vs. private.

    One quick win I’ve thought could bridge this is updating our docs site to respond to `Accept: text/markdown` requests with the markdown version of the docs.