5  How to Work with an Agent

An agentic tool is not a chatbot. The biggest mistake people make is treating it like one — free-form messages, tangents, and endless conversations that confuse both you and the agent.

The discipline is simple: one task, one session, one handoff.

5.1 The workflow

flowchart TD
    A["🎯 Pick a task"] --> B["🔍 Plan first"]
    B --> C["🔨 Build small"]
    C --> D{"Done or\nswitching?"}
    D -- Yes --> E["📝 Handoff note\nto notes/"]
    E --> F["/clear"]
    F --> A
    D -- "No, keep going" --> C

That’s the whole thing. Let’s walk through each step.

5.2 Pick a task

Every session starts with a task — something with a clear scope.

Good tasks Not tasks
“Draft the introduction chapter” “Help me with my project”
“Figure out why the PDF won’t render” “Let’s work on stuff”
“Brainstorm what sections this book needs” “Tell me about Quarto”
“Write tests for the data-loading function” “Make everything better”

A task can be planning, research, brainstorming, or building. The point is that it has a boundary.

5.3 Plan first, build small

Two rules that save time and money:

Plan before you build. Start by asking the agent to explore and make a plan. Save the plan to notes/. Then clear and start a fresh session to execute. Exploration context clutters implementation.

Build small before building big. One chapter, one function, one section at a time. Review it, then continue. Small pieces are easier to check and cheaper to redo.

5.4 Close the loop

When you’re done with a task — or switching to a different one — or the conversation is just getting long — close it:

  1. Tell the agent: “I’m about to clear. Write a handoff note to notes/ with what we did and what’s next.”
  2. Run /clear
  3. Start the next task fresh

The handoff note is a short file — what was done, what’s next, any decisions made. Not a transcript, not a code dump. A sticky note for the next session.

You don’t have to finish to close. “Got halfway through X, next step is Y” is a perfectly good handoff. The next session picks it up.

5.5 Why this matters

WarningLong conversations cost you three ways
  1. Money — every message resends the entire conversation history
  2. Quality — the agent drifts and loses focus as context piles up
  3. Risk — if the session dies, you lose everything since the last handoff

Short, focused tasks with handoff notes between them are cheaper, more reliable, and easier to pick up later — by you or by someone else on your team.

5.6 What about /resume?

Most tools can resume the previous session. This works for short interruptions — you stepped away for coffee and want to continue the same task.

But for picking up work after a longer gap, or when someone else is taking over, start fresh:

Read the notes in notes/ and continue where we left off.

This gives the agent exactly the context it needs and nothing it doesn’t. And anyone on the team can pick it up — not just the person who started it.