I have an agent swear jar. It lives in Obsidian and is filling up quickly.
Each entry is simple: a date, the ticket I was working on and an observation about something that happened while working with AI.
2026-08-18 — Code review
Agent missed that Preview and Production are isolated environments.
2026-08-20 — Code review
The explanation is too long and reads like an ad.
2026-08-21 — Cloudflare fix
The function names are too vague. collectByProjectId() collects what?Problems like these are easy to brush aside when I’m trying to finish a ticket. I correct the agent, work around the problem and move on. The ticket gets done, but my setup has learned nothing.
I try to empty the jar every day. I turn repeated feedback into instructions in my agent skills, put missing information where agents can find it and look for manual steps I can automate. Not every entry leads to a change, and most changes are small. But each fix can improve future work for me and my colleagues. All those little changes compound.
As agents write more of the code, more of my job becomes building the system that produces it. The swear jar turns that work into a deliberate practice.