Deep Work, AI and Software Dev
13 May 2026
I love diving deep into work and really thinking things through. I wish I could do more of that! As Carl Newport puts it, in our super-distracted world, these are our real strengths. Deep work helped me bring Maestro into our development process.
— put phone away —
First, I asked Claude to teach me about Maestro. I asked as if I was genuinely interested, wanting to learn and make this a part of our development pipeline. This would help our mobile developers run tests and not rely solely on our testers.
I needed to know how Maestro worked before I could integrate it. I couldn’t just jump in without understanding. A mini-AI crash course was needed. I had to understand how the tool worked and figure out what changes to my code would be needed. Once I understood how it would be integrated, I let AI handle all the boring part of writing the code (VS Code + Claude). Yes, I don’t see myself writing code anymore. AI can do it faster and better. We technologists rather spend time thinking and figuring out what and how to build than laying the bricks.
Vibe-coding is much more enjoyable when you understand what you’re doing and have a good idea of the code being injected. It’s like having superpowers 💪! When you don’t know something, you often end up going in circles, and the biggest problem happens when something goes wrong and you’re left to rely on AI to fix it (which sometimes goes in circles and gives you options to choose from).
I nurtured this project for a week, but it happened at a very fast pace, which was truly amazing. It’s off to the developers now. Without AI this would have taken me many weeks.
Think of AI as your superpower.