Redesign Rules
The redesign is not abstract. It is a handful of moves you can name, practice, and check yourself against.
This is the practitioner altitude of becoming AI native: what your own daily work becomes when AI does the doing. It is the complement to the organizational altitude (shared context, encoded intent), and it is where an individual’s leverage actually compounds. The rules below are the concrete how.
Where your time goes
- Plans are the new code. Spend roughly 80% of your effort planning and 20% building. The quality of the output tracks the quality of the plan, so the plan is now the work. (Every, compound engineering)
- The 50/50 rule. Spend half your time on the task and half on improving the system that does the task. If you only do the work, you finish the work. If you also improve the system, the next run is better. (Every, compound engineering)
Build the system, not just the output
- Package repeatable work into scaffolding. Anything you do more than once becomes a skill, a command, or a workflow, so you stop redoing it by hand. If you don’t want to be the human plugin, build the plugin. (Nate)
- Make your environment agent-native. Anything you can do, your agent should be able to do the same way. If a step requires clicking a button, build the command that triggers it. (Every, compound engineering)
- Extract your taste into the system. Encode your standards, preferences, and house style so the system builds the way you would, not the way a generic model defaults to. (Every, compound engineering)
- Make the deterministic parts deterministic. For anything that must be exact (tests, validation, formatting, structural checks), use a script or a hook. Do not ask the model to remember to be careful. (Nate)
Run it well
- Build the context before you prompt. Assemble the source material and the relevant background first, so the system reasons from authoritative context instead of inventing to fill gaps. (Nate)
- Trust the process, but build safety nets. Trust the system to do the work, and build the monitoring and review that catches it when it does not. Trust is earned by watching it work, not granted blind. (Every, compound engineering)
- Lean into parallelization. Structure work so multiple agents or processes can run concurrently instead of serially. (Every, compound engineering)