Ask me less.
Get more done.
AI agents keep getting more capable. Your attention each day stays the same. Ask Me Less is where every agent lines up when it needs your call: only what is yours to decide reaches you, and each kind of question gets asked once.
For now it’s a system the author uses every day, not yet open to others. The card format draft is open source.
Launch the website tonight, or wait until you’ve looked at it in the morning?
- Why you
- Once it’s live, anyone can see it. You said you want to see anything public before it goes out.
- Suggestion
- Wait until morning. No one is waiting for it tonight, and a look in the morning takes you two minutes.
A sample card. Try the buttons.
Attention is what’s scarce
Models keep getting cheaper, and agents can work through the night. The one thing that hasn’t grown is how much you can really pay attention to each day.
Yet many agents treat your attention as free. When the work is done, they dump a long report on you, with the one question you actually need to answer buried in the middle. If you miss it, the agent just sits there waiting.
Finished the homepage refactor; 14 files changed. The navigation bar is now responsive, and the mobile menu no longer overflows on narrow screens. Images are lazy-loaded, cutting the initial load by about a third.
The build passes and all tests pass. The deploy script has been updated. Also need you to confirm whether to go live now, or whether you’d rather check it in the preview environment first. I also noticed the footer’s copyright year was still last year’s, so I updated it.
Suggested next steps: add accessibility labels; look into an image compression service; the analytics script could load later…
One way in, one question per card
Agents that write code, do research or watch the numbers, whoever made them, all reach you through the same way in.
- One question per cardThe title makes sense without the backstory. The card says why it has to be you, and the agent offers its suggestion and reasons up front.
- Agents wait for you, not the other way aroundWhile the agent waits for your answer, it gets on with work that doesn’t depend on it.
- Answer anywhereTap on your phone, or just say it in a chat. Either way, the same answer is recorded.
- Quiet at nightAnything that isn’t urgent waits until morning. Sleep comes before any work.
The more you use it, the less it asks
What’s worth interrupting you for differs from person to person, and the only possible filter is your own values.
Each time you answer, you can add “handle these this way from now on.” That becomes a rule, and next time the agent just does it instead of asking. Agents’ mistakes get written down too, and turned into set ways of working, so next time doesn’t depend on remembering.
At firstAsks whenever it’s unsure
After a whileAsks only about what’s new
Later onOnly your real calls
The most expensive link
PowerModelsAgentsYour attentionThe life you want
The first three will keep getting more plentiful. The fourth won’t. How good your life turns out depends on what each bit of attention buys you. Ask Me Less looks after that one link.
The author’s own version
One aim above all: turn a lifetime’s time and effort into as many good days as possible. When unsure whether to do something, I ask three questions first:
- Will it get easier the more I do it?
- Am I doing a task, or building a system that keeps working for me?
- Is it good for my whole life, or only for right now?
Below that are seven things I check every week. No agent’s work is allowed to crowd them out.
- Enough sleep
- Strength training
- Cardio
- Eating well
- Relationships that feel easy
- No money worries
- A career moving forward
Everyone has a different direction and different things to protect, so the rules they build up differ too.
The format is open
What a good card should contain has been written up as a public draft.
A card carries options, a suggestion, the evidence and the risks, and it says whether a choice can be undone. The draft comes with 30 examples, and any agent can follow it to ask a person.