I started to use a notebook again to slow down when AI Agents keep seeking for my attention

Yes, the physical notebook.

The AI agents have been biasing, or even driving, my thinking a lot from the last months.

Recently, I was doing system exploration, root cause analysis, and understanding why the system behaved in a certain way using Claude Code.

The whole process felt wrong. It made me anxious.

Claude was aiming to jump into fixing mode, touching everything, adding console.log() everywhere. That same feeling when I started my career, and I had no clue what I was doing, but I had to act fast, try a lot of things, to show that I was doing my best effort.

As I progressed in my career, I learned to be calm, and approach the solution with patience, and in a systematic approach.

Claude Code made me go back to the anxious times. Jumping from file to file, changing things, trying things out, without stopping to understand the whole, without a method.

I realized that the AI tools seek your attention all the time,
they are made to keep you on the loop, or their loop.

I wasn’t thinking, I was burning tokens.

Indeed, I felt I was one prompt away of making Claude Code to fix the problem, but it wasn’t happening.

At that moment I closed my IDE, my laptop, and when to the office cafeteria with my notebook and a pencil.

So, I recreated the problem using visuals.

I’m a visual person, because I have a little of dyslexia, and reading is an effort to be sure I read the thing correctly. Claude Code wasn’t helping me there with all the words after each 20 words prompt.

I dedicated 20 min to understand the whole thing, by drawing it myself, I was able to see the problem on another angle, a systems angle.

10 minutes later, I went back to the code, and found the bug. It wasn’t in the code per se, but how the systems interact that we assumed certain things from the infrastructure.

That kind of error that only happens in prod, because in local and staging everything looks fine.

I enjoyed that process.

Stopping, using my problem-solving skills, and fix the issue that took me the whole morning.

Slowing down, the process of writing and drawing helped my brain to take the necessary time to think and understand the problem. Not to tell Claude to do 1, 2, or 3.

Tools matter. Tools are designed to influence how you behave.

Change the tool if it is not helping you.

You don’t need to adapt yourself to the tool if it isn’t helping you to achieve your outcome.