Week 95 | Working on the Go With AI Agents Is Harder Than I Thought

Last Week

Last week I said I wanted to try a vacation-and-work mode: take a break after walking, sit down with a drink, and use my phone to give the agents some work. This is the first report from that experiment, and it is a short one.

This is Week 95 of building Shokken, my restaurant waitlist management tool. It is available on Google Play and the iOS App Store.

A Short Update From the Road

I am in Suzhou this week, about 50 miles from Shanghai, and the weather is beautiful. I had planned to keep Shokken moving while I traveled, with my AI agents doing useful work while I checked in from my phone.

That is not how it went. Working on the go turned out to be much harder than I expected, even with agents that can keep running without me sitting in front of a computer. This week’s video is deliberately short because there is not much progress to report: I really have not gotten much work done.

The Hard Part Is Attention, Not Tooling

The agents were available. The difficulty was everything around them. If I want to enjoy the moment and be with friends and family, I cannot also be watching a task, checking the first result, and correcting the direction.

That is the part I underestimated. The work I do with agents is not a single action I can squeeze into a spare minute. It is a loop: give the task, look at what came back, decide whether it is going the right way, and either correct it or let it continue. The loop needs attention, and attention is exactly what is in short supply when I am traveling and want to be present with the people I am with.

So the honest result for Week 95 is that the vacation-and-work experiment did not produce much work. That is worth recording rather than dressing up. A short update with a clear reason is more useful than a long one that pretends the week went differently.

Next Week

I will have a more detailed update, if not next week then definitely the week after, about what working with agents while traveling was actually like: what I managed to get done, where the handoffs broke down, and what I would change about the setup.

For now, I am going to sign off and enjoy the beautiful weather here in Suzhou.

If you are interested in the restaurant waitlist tool itself, visit Shokken. It is available on Google Play and the iOS App Store.