The Theme
The limitation of agentic assistance while traveling: that is the theme for this week.
This is Week 96 of building Shokken, my restaurant waitlist management tool. It is available on Google Play and the iOS App Store, and the app itself is in good shape. What I want to talk about is not the app. It is the development journey and, specifically, what it looked like to keep it moving while I was away.
Two Weeks Away From the Desk
I have been traveling for the last two weeks. Right now I am recording from my childhood bedroom, which has good memories and terrible lighting: very high color temperature, low CRI, and extremely harsh.
The plan was simple. Not features, but the maintenance work: bug squashes, updates, the things that probably do not require a lot of my input. I would tell an agent what I wanted, it would do it, and I would look at the result between the parts of the trip I actually wanted to enjoy.
That turned out to be quite a bit more complicated than I anticipated.
What Actually Works: Deterministic Work
Some of it works very well. Take this video. The processing is fairly deterministic: transcribe the source, correct the transcript, author a frame map, send it to the render machine, run the matte and the render, finalize, upload it, attach captions, publish the blog post. That is a pipeline. It could be replicated by some lines of code, without any AI in the loop, and it is repeatable enough that an agent can run it with minimal intervention.
That is the part the tools are genuinely good at: simple, repeatable, well-defined tasks. If the task has a clear definition and a verifiable result, delegation works.
Where It Breaks: Discretion
The trouble starts when the work becomes discretionary.
This week I wanted to update dependencies in my Android application, or rather my KMP application. Kotlin Multiplatform, because the app is published on both platforms. Version updates are never very straightforward, and this application uses hundreds of dependencies. The mechanical part is easy for an agent: bump this, fix that import, find the compile error. The hard part is everything around it.
If I move my Android target SDK up to the next level, how many users do I exclude? What do I gain? How much runway do I have for Google Play compliance? The agent can find all of that out. It cannot decide whether I want to do it now or later, and I am not comfortable with it making that decision yet. That is the boundary I keep running into.
The Cost Nobody Mentions
Then there is the part I underestimated: attention.
I found myself reading on the go, while walking, with my family looking around at things while I was down on my phone checking something. In other words, I removed myself from the vacation to do tasks, because I thought I could double my productivity while traveling. It did not turn out very well.
The other work made it worse. I now structure videos for the weekly updates, the product tutorials, and the Tuesday explainers. Every draft needs a read, every storyboard needs a proper screen, and a phone is not that screen. Add the VPN situation and streaming media gets painful. None of these is a big problem on its own. Together they are the difference between a hands-free, worry-free setup and one that quietly eats the trip.
What I Think Now
My conclusion is still tentative, but it is that even with agentic assistance I will probably not become very productive when I am away from my development environment. There is quite a bit of way to go before that changes.
I also think a lot of what you see on social media, the “agents do everything and you do nothing” version of agentic development, is mostly hype. Some of it might be accurate. Most of it is not, because the tiny frictions accumulate, and those frictions are exactly what stands between a demo and a working week.
I am adjusting my expectations for the long trip next year. Maybe by then this post reads differently.
If you are interested in the restaurant waitlist tool itself, visit Shokken. It is available on Google Play and the iOS App Store.