The most useful change in how I work this year isn’t a new app. It’s a habit. When I’m working with AI agents now, I decide the outcome I want, write it down clearly, and let the agent handle the how. I stay on the what and the why. The agent does the rest — after the plan is clear.
Last month gave me a clean example of why that matters. Here’s the story.
The job: move a live site to my own hardware
I run a small homelab at home — my own machines, where I host web apps and tinker. (Yes, I’m a minimalist with too many computers. I’ve made peace with it.) Once in a while I like to prove a more open internet is still possible — that you don’t have to put everything with the handful of giant providers that run most of the cloud; you can run your own slice. So I set myself a real test.
The outcome I wanted: take orantesgallery.com, a live site, off a big cloud provider and move it onto my own hardware. No downtime.
That was the whole brief I started with. One clear outcome.
What working with AI agents actually looks like
The old way would have been me, a dozen browser tabs, and a long night pasting terminal commands I’d half-forgotten by morning. Configure the server. Wrangle the backups. Hit a wall. Search. Try again.
What actually happened: I handed over the outcome and stayed at the level that needs my judgment. And it wasn’t all smooth. I started with a trial run — the agent helped configure the server and walked the migration from the backup files, but we hit a few glitches along the way. So we worked them out together, one at a time: I’d point at what wasn’t right, the agent would adjust, we’d try again — until the whole thing ran clean from start to finish.
That made the real cutover the easy part. We’d already practiced it. The site came back up with no downtime.
I never dropped into technician mode. I stayed the person deciding what “done” looks like.
The part that actually matters
Here’s the part I keep thinking about. Once we’d ironed out every glitch, the agent documented the entire process — every step, in order, kinks already worked out. Then it turned that into a reusable skill.
So the next time I migrate a site, it isn’t a research project. The thinking is already captured, and we just use the skill.
That’s the difference between using AI as a one-off shortcut and using it the way I want to: every job leaves behind something that makes the next one faster. The work compounds.
The whole method, in one line
This is how I want to work on everything — and it’s how I work at Minimo Studio. I decide the what and the why. The AI handles the how, only after the plan is clear. The tools don’t replace the judgment; they carry it out, and they make good judgment repeatable.
It’s the same order I bring to every website: strategy first, get clear on the outcome, then let the tools build. The thinking is the part that’s mine. The execution is the part I can hand off — and document, so it never starts from scratch again.
More of this in the open as I build it.
Less noise. More clarity.
