Working with an AI Pair: Outsource Your Mental Workload to Your Commit Messages

I think I’ve found a new workflow I really like: In “AI mode”, using the latest git commit message as a to-think-of list, and git amending it when I add/remove things.

When working with an AI pair programmer/agent (aidermacs with sonnet-4.5 in my case), I regularly have my mental workload maxed out.

Not only do I need/want to understand most of the code it writes, I also need to:

• keep track of what’s not working from the existing stuff
• evaluate different avenues at the same time (and be able to jump between them)
• keep track of which features I still need.

And this all the while I can test hypotheses at at least double the pre-AI speed.

Normally, I’d say I should keep something like this in Obsidian, and if I had my life taken over by Emacs already, org-mode, but I’ve found that adds more friction than I like. (In the time I think about a filename for this, it’s over.)

So far, my process looks/looked like adding a commit for most of the single-prompt changes aidermacs adds—so that I’m able to jump between them, and then somehow trying to keep the todos in my head in addition to everything else.

Today, I had an insight:

Next time when I’m working on a bigger feature and have too much mental workload, I’m gonna try that out there, too.