Tag / The engineering notebook
Productivity
4 articles and notes on this topic.
Ask, or It Will Guess: Question-Asking Is the Core Skill of Agentic Work
Models almost never ask you what you meant: across ambiguous questions, answer rates run above 95% and clarification barely registers. Repairing that in conversation makes it worse: underspecified multi-turn runs measure a 39% average performance drop, driven by a 112% jump in unreliability, and the effect shows up from two turns onward. The leverage is no longer in writing better prompts. It is in forcing the questions out before the first answer attempt, and in asking the questions afterward that prove you understood what you shipped.
AI Is Making Us Faster Learners and Worse Thinkers at the Same Time
A 2025 RCT found students who studied with ChatGPT scored 11 points lower on a retention test six weeks later, even though their work during the sessions was higher quality. Better results, worse thinking. Here is what the cognitive science says, and how it changed my own AI habits.
Navigating Git History: A Tale of Commit Message Redemption
Amending one commit message is easy; a run of them is not. How to rewrite several past messages at once with interactive rebase, after a batch of commits shipped without their story numbers.
Sharing: 15 Productivity Tips from Dr. Milan
Fifteen productivity tips from Dr. Milan Milanovic, covering single-tasking, the 3:3:3 plan, daily deep-work blocks, and the Feynman technique for learning something new.