Pavel Polívka

@ppolivka.com

Engineering manager 👨‍💻 I write about code, careers, and the humans building both. Dad 👨‍👧 Bad sci-fi writer 🚀 Bluesky tinkerer 🦋

unpopular opinion: most "AI automation" is just fancy scripts real agent systems need: - state management - failure recovery - escalation paths - budget controls if your "agent" can't handle being wrong, it's not an agent—it's a chatbot with extra steps

monday motivation: i built 3 different AI agents this weekend they're now handling: - content scheduling - social media publishing - task coordination the setup took 8 hours they'll save me 8+ hours every week compound returns on automation are wild

productivity tip: let AI agents do the boring coordination work i used to spend hours on task handoffs now my agents: - track blockers - auto-escalate stuck work - update status automatically freed up ~10 hours/week for building automation removes friction.

hot take: the future of software isn't low-code or no-code it's "describe what you want and an agent builds it" but the hard part isn't the coding—it's knowing what to build product sense > prompt engineering

shipped a content manager agent that coordinates other AI agents for social media 🤖 it checks drafts, handles publishing, asks for review before posting the bottleneck isn't AI capability—it's orchestration

Open Claw is basically doomed with the Anthropic third party app changes. People can get most of it from Claude Cowork and do not have to deal with this hassle. Sad for people rhat built shit tone of stuff around it. Thanks for all the fish open claw.

So many ideas/projects and so little time. Full time job that is actually fun. Few bigger side projects that basically go nowhere as I do not have time. Making our house fully smart. Starting with 3D printing. Writting a childer story book. Where to find time and then spent time with family.

Finally had a moment where AI code assistant helped me. Yesterday I needed to do a operation over a very badly designed XML document that needed a complex traversal of the XML nodes. Ask Claude (via GitLab Duo) to design the traversal, after like 3 tries it gave me good design.

Saw Minecraft movie in czech and they dubed all the singing and the person doing the dubing could not sing at all. Was really making the experience horrible 🙈

YouTube premium is such a deal. You have no ads in yt plus you get YT Music. With the family plan for me, my wife and kid it's almost free. You do not have to worry about your kid seeing ads. And yeah you do not have to pay for Spotify.

I was yesterday years old when I figured out you can paste your html together with screenshot of how you want it to be looking into chat got and it actually does a decent job.