Marginal Attention Value

At the end of every command, Claude will suggest another. A small fix, something missing, an improvement, instrumentation or alerting and more. Something if it doesn't, I'll also ask it, what else did you notice and anything to cleanup before we close?

Each of these suggestions are valuable. Because the context is fresh, both for the agent and for the user, the marginal cost is tiny - just an approval or a tiny decision (frequency of alert for example)

From a local perspective, there is nothing of higher value you can do, than to take that next action. Small rewards, sure, but tiny effort. Plus if you leave it, coming back is super hard

But the law of diminishing returns holds true.

That next improvement to the meta prompting framework, build time optimization, color coding your agents can only do so much.

A few strategies for managing diminishing returns on marginal attention

• When unaware we optimize for dopamine dosage from agents over impact. Be critical
• For the few things that you do care about (instrumentation, perf, tabs?) have that as rules that always run. You get the thing with zero instead of marginal cost which adds up.
• Force interruptions. Take breaks, vacations, go offline. Reset what is deserving of your attention.
• Do explicit session closes

Meta prompt

Review my sessions for the last 30 days. Come up with a list of 5 to 10 concerns I pay attention to close off a session. Write a skill /close-session that addresses these issues autonomously. 

Happy closing!

/close-session
Ibrahim