Kent Beck has a subscriber post called return of Multi-tasking? where he’s realizing he’s more often working on different things across a day now that he’s working with genies. Less time doing clackety-clack and more time thinking about next steps (or napping for epiphanies).

I’ve noticed the same pattern, this “productive multi-tasking” where you shift to something else when you’re stuck or “cogitating in the background.” Whether it’s waiting for feedback, getting help from the CI team (why won’t their plugin inject the AWS credentials it’s supposed to?), or just running out of brain juice and needing to let things percolate (which I want to remember Slow Productivity also recommends, especially for more nebulous work).

Commands with commas: I came across this a couple of years ago, and I’ve been using it for my new scripts since.

Debian today supports a huge number of commands; my modest Ubuntu laptop shows several thousand available:

$ apt-file search -x ‘^/usr/bin/[^/]*$’ | wc -l
21733

The solution was obviously to adjust my command names in such a way that they were still easy to type, but would never be chosen as system command names.
[…]

There was but one character left: the simple, modest comma.

A quick experiment revealed in a flash that the comma was exactly the character that I had been looking for! Every tool and shell that lay in arm’s reach treated the comma as a perfectly normal and unobjectionable character in a filename.[…]

And, best of all, thanks to the magic of tab-completion, it became very easy to browse my entire collection of commands. […]
I simply type a comma followed by tab and my list of commands appears