🏡

👨‍🎨

🤖

📚

📝

 

Attention vs Secrecy

Published: Mar 03, 2026

In the world of coding agents that produce code at superhuman quality and speed, the relative value of human attention and process secrecy increases.

If your process is secret, then it is harder for coding agents to blindly copy it, especially if it is backend heavy.

And of course, human attention remains finite, with ever-better software competing for it.

When building software, especially software that is meant to be doing a long-running work task, we are confronted with a choice: Should we explain or help the user understand what is going on in the backend, encouraging the user to pay attention to us and the work we are doing? Or should we instead stay mute and alert the user once the work is done, at the cost of the user paying context switching elsewhere and not paying us as much attention?

This is something that we are actively grappling with, and have for now settled on a compromise whereby we reveal some, but not too much, of the backend processing.

The correct answer is likely to change over time as agents improve --perhaps soon all they will need is a few input-output pairs to replicate a process-- but for now this is what we've settled on.