Bo’s Blog

Over the last three weeks, I've been studying how to get the most out of agentic coding tools -- not by throwing everything at them, but by being deliberate about how I use them.

The common assumption among many users seems to be that maximising value from something like Claude Max is straightforward: crank up the thinking effort, throw in a vague prompt, and let it burn through your weekly usage. More tokens consumed must mean more work done, right? I'd argue the opposite.

My approach has been focused on minimising waste at every step. Before an agent touches a task, I prepare comprehensive instruction sets and structured markdown files it can read immediately -- this dramatically reduces the time and context an agent needs to orient itself and get going. Rather than babysitting sessions interactively, I run everything through remote servers with tmux, which lets me monitor tasks continuously without being physically present. During the day, I define and queue up tasks with clear todos, so the agent keeps working through the night while I sleep. The work doesn't stop when I do.

The results have been tangible. In my first week, I used roughly 20% of my weekly allocation. Second week, around 30%. This week is trending toward 70%+ -- but that's not because I've become less efficient. It's because the pipeline is now mature enough to take on significantly more ambitious work. In these three weeks, this setup has produced over 2,000 unit and integration tests -- a volume that would have taken far longer and cost far more with a less structured approach.

The lesson I'd take from this: don't stress about hitting your usage ceiling every week. A half-used week with a well-structured pipeline and meaningful output beats a maxed-out week of chaotic, expensive prompting. Build the scaffolding first. The productivity will follow -- and it will compound.