I’ve a long-running manual task going on at work (which is to say: I’m marking undergraduate assessments). This can be – I mean, perish the thought, but also let’s be real – just a little tedious.
Today, I’ve been trying a new approach, which I’m calling ‘Reverse Pomodoro.’ I set a 15-minute timer after which I take a 5-minute break to check in with GitHub Copilot and see where it’s got to in building out a local vision processing toolchain for another project entirely. I check, re-prompt, then go back to marking. Reset the timer.
Half a day in, and I have a working proof-of-concept of a tool which might just save us multiple person-days. The cost has merely been… mmm… roughly halving my marking throughput. Ah.
Related: this interview with Simon Willison and why he’s exhausted by 11am.