Field note
The "next?" reflex
A field note on what fast iteration loops do to attention.
One word runs through the entire record of building with coding agents. After a tool finishes something, or breaks something, or claims to have finished something, the message back is almost always the same: next?
It is easy to read that as momentum. It is closer to the sound of an iteration loop that got very fast without getting more certain. The work now goes: idea, prompt, implementation, failure, inspection, correction, next?, and around again. The cost of one turn of that loop has collapsed. The number of turns required has not, and neither has the judgement needed at each one to notice that the thing just handed over is subtly wrong.
The reflex to type next? before actually looking is the specific bad habit this creates. The countermeasure is unglamorous — read the diff, run the test, hit the endpoint by hand — and it does not compress. When cheap generation meets a tired person at 1 a.m., the loop wants to keep spinning. Slowing it down on purpose is most of the discipline.
This note is deliberately short. Field notes here are small observations, allowed to stay unresolved.