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Code like a surgeon

geoffreylitt.com · 936 words · saved by 1 readers

A lot of people say AI will make us all “managers” or “editors”…but I think this is a dangerously incomplete view! Personally, I’m trying to code like a surgeon. A surgeon isn’t a manager, they do the actual work! But their skills and time are highly leveraged with a support team that handles prep, secondary tasks, admin. The surgeon focuses on the important stuff they are uniquely good at. My current goal with AI coding tools is to spend 100% of my time doing stuff that matters. (As a UI prototyper, that mostly means tinkering with design concepts.) It turns out there are a LOT of secondary tasks which AI agents are now good enough to help out with. Some things I’m finding useful to hand off these days: I often find it useful to run these secondary tasks async in the background – while I’m eating lunch, or even literally overnight! When I sit down for a work session, I want to feel like a surgeon walking into a prepped operating room. Everything is ready for me to do what I’m good at.

October 2025 Code like a surgeon A lot of people say AI will make us all "managers" or "editors"…but I think this is a dangerously incomplete view! Personally, I'm trying to code like a surgeon. A surgeon isn't a manager, they do the actual work! But their skills and time are highly leveraged with a support team that handles prep, secondary tasks, admin. The surgeon focuses on the important stuff they are uniquely good at. My current goal with AI coding tools is to spend 100% of my time doing stuff that matters. (As a UI prototyper, that mostly means tinkering with design concepts.) It

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