Many years ago, when I was younger and thought a PhD sounded like a sensible life choice, I started one.
Early on, a lecturer gave me a piece of advice that stuck:
“Don’t watch the program run.”
He meant the long jobs. Training a neural net. Running simulations. Anything where the terminal starts spitting out numbers and you just… sit there. Watching loss values tick down as if your attention somehow helps.
It feels like work.
It’s not.
You can burn an entire afternoon that way and have nothing to show for it except slightly better metrics.
His point was simple: start the job, then get out of the way. Make coffee. Write something. Read a paper. Talk to an actual human. Do work that requires a brain.
Lately I’ve caught myself doing the same thing with coding agents.
You kick one off and suddenly you’re staring at “Thinking…” like it’s a progress bar for your own productivity. Then the text starts streaming past and you read every line, as if supervising it in real time makes it better.
It’s the exact same trap.
The machine is busy. You don’t need to be.
When you see “Thinking…”, that’s probably your cue to step away and do something only you can do. And if I’m honest, that usually isn’t more coding.