The split
In late 2025 I gave myself a $1,000 Claude Code credit and a question: could a product manager with no coding background ship real software? Thirty-one days later there were 215 commits and 38,000 lines of TypeScript. When I looked back at where the work had gone, it fell into three kinds, and I gave them rough shares:
| Share | Work | Who |
|---|---|---|
| 64 | Direction: what to build, for whom, what done looks like, what is off limits | Me |
| 33 | Execution: the code, the tests, the plumbing, the second and third attempt | Claude |
| 3 | Refinement: the taste calls made side by side, reading the result together | Both |
The surprise was the first row. I expected to be a bottleneck on code. I was a bottleneck on clarity. Every hour Claude spent going the wrong way traced back to a sentence I had not written.
The essays from that month are part one and part two. What follows is the version I run today.
Direction is the job
A year on, the shares have held and the shape has changed. In 2025 direction meant a good prompt in a chat window. Now it means a brief: a short document an agent can work from for hours, alone, on its own branch. Tonight this site was reorganized by several of those running side by side: one on navigation, one on copy, one writing the page you are reading. My part was the briefs and the calls only I could make.
A brief that works has five parts, and the last two are the ones people skip:
brief.md — copy this
# Brief: [one line, the outcome in the user's words] ## Done looks like [what a person will see or be able to do when this is finished] ## Context [the repo, the conventions, decisions already made; a few lines] ## Defaults [where the ask is ambiguous, the choice to make without asking] ## Off limits [files, systems or steps that belong to someone else, and anything that cannot be undone] ## Report back with [what changed, what you decided, the one or two calls that are mine]
"Defaults" is what lets an agent keep moving at three in the morning instead of parking on a question. "Off limits" is what lets you sleep.
Hand off execution whole
The 33 is where the leverage is, and it only pays if you let go of it. Hand over the whole task: branch, code, tests, the pull request, the fix when CI goes red. Stepping in to type a line yourself feels efficient and costs you the thread. Read the result instead.
Run tasks in parallel when they touch different files, and give each its own branch so they cannot trip over each other. When two need the same file, name an owner in both briefs. The others send their changes through the owner, the way two people would.
The three percent
Refinement is small in hours and large in consequence. It is the moment you read the diff, look at the page on your phone, and say "the headline is wrong" or "this is two ideas, split it". Claude is good at proposing; the final call on taste stays with you, because you are the one who has to live with it.
The best refinement turns into rules. This site has a test that fails the build when a page slips back into a short list of banned words, written after a long night of deleting them by hand. Once a taste call is a test, no agent can drift back past it, and you never make that call again.
Brakes before speed
Before anything runs unattended, install the brakes:
- Permission gates. Pushing, deploying, deleting and sending anything outside the project wait for a human yes.
- A secrets denylist. Keys never enter a prompt, a log or a commit.
- Tests as the trust boundary. Nothing merges red. A green suite plus a smoke check is the bar; how sure the agent sounds does not count.
- A memory file. Decisions, conventions and gotchas go in a shared notes file so the next session starts where the last one stopped and nobody asks you the same question twice.
- A morning review. Agents run overnight; you read the merge queue with coffee. Anything you would not have approved is a sentence missing from a brief.
Try it this week
- Pick one task you have been meaning to do for a month. Write the brief above before you open any AI tool.
- Hand it off whole. Do not touch the code. Read the result and note every place it went sideways.
- For each sideways turn, find the missing sentence in your brief and add it to a running list.
- After five tasks, turn the list into your project's notes file and one or two tests.
By the fifth task you will notice where your time has gone: less on typing, more on deciding. That shift is the whole method.
Next door
When an agent hits a wall it cannot get over, the Filip Method gives it a notebook to climb with. When the thing it builds is a screen that looks wrong, read Rescue a Screen That Looks Wrong.