Todos and human-todos: staying focused while AI codes

A technique I love with AI: at the root of the codebase, I keep a todos markdown file and a human-todos markdown file.

Then I ask the AI to note down everything it spots as development goes along (there are always little things). It keeps a list for me without pulling my focus from the task at hand.

The human-todos is for what lives outside the code, what only I can do (or an agent I hand control of the browser to…).

And regularly, I start 1 or 2 background sessions to kill the todos.

The result: I don’t drift during a session, while tackling technical debt and small improvements on the side. It’s one of the habits I pass on to the teams I help.

Seasoned readers will tell me all of this could very easily go into Linear tickets through an MCP… and they’d be right :)

But I like my todos! And when I see it grow, it makes my hair stand on end and I notice it right away (vs a backlog which, as we all know, is just a ticket graveyard).