Peter Steinberger Says Just Talk To It, and He's Mostly Right
The Man Behind the Minimalism I met Peter Steinberger at Claude Anonymous in London sometime in June, and the presentation was properly fun. He's got that energy where you can tell he's not performing, he's just genuinely excited about the stuff he's building. Maintains a 300k line TypeScript React ecosystem. Web app, Chrome extension, CLI tool, Tauri desktop client, Expo mobile app. All maintained by one person with AI agents. And his setup is basically: open 3-8 parallel Codex instances, write short prompts (often 1-2 sentences plus a screenshot), let them go. He calls everything else "charade." I've been following his work since and I reckon he's one of the most practical voices in the agentic coding space. No hype. No frameworks for the sake of frameworks. Just a bloke who ships a lot of code with AI and has opinions about how to do it well. His Principles (and Where I Stand) Here's the full list from his talk and blog posts. I agree with most of it. Where I don't, I'll say so. Things I violently agree with: Use tmux to run CLIs persistently. Absolutely. This is foundational. If you're not doing this, start here. Use ast-grep as a pre-commit hook. Proper structural linting that catches things regex can't. Brilliant addition to any agent workflow. Ask for options before executing. I built a whole /interview skill around this. Get the model to present choices rather than guessing. Way better outcomes. Don't reset context. Cold start wastes time + tokens. Agreed, but I'd go further. Don't reset, /handover instead. Summarise what was accomplished, carry it to the next session. Cold start is a waste. Context reset without transfer is nearly as bad. Give examples. Multi-shot prompting is always better than zero-shot. If you want the model to output something specific, show it what that looks like first. Massively improves one-shot accuracy. Use voice input. Absolutely. I started with Superwhisper and it changed how I work. Speaking your intent while pacing around the