by mergesort | 2025-12-27 16:56:27+00:00
You raise a couple of really good questions!

1. I find Claude Code's handling of the context window to be pretty poor, and one of the reasons why I use it for smaller things versus multi-hour coding sessions. I'm not sure what dark magic OpenAI has done to make their context window feel infinite, but Codex has become a better choice for that at the moment.

2. A small note on subagents but Claude Code did this right. Subagents are granted their own context window, so they don't spill over into your context window until they're done doing their own work — and the added context is relatively minimal. I'd love to see OpenAI adopt this pattern as well, especially in combination with something like Skills rather than leaning into MCP.

3. When I suggested adding skills, I mean ones that are far more complicated than your example, and can drive a chunk of work autonomously. The skill I use for writing in-app copy (which I'm bad at because you can see I'm never short for words) is about 100 lines long. It includes my style guide as an accessible resource, and a mostly complete history of my Bluesky posts to help achieve the authentic tone I when discussing Plinky. (I write all of my posts, so this really is my voice.)

These kinds of skills save me a lot of time as an indie developer! As I mentioned I have ones for data insights, fact-checking, and of course for code. My main suggestion would be to think through every step of your work and see if they can be automated, and then turn small pieces of that into skills.

—--

It's hard to assign a specific percentage to how much my effectiveness has improved, but it's a lot. The reason I don't want to put a number on it is that what I've gotten is a far broader set of skills (no pun intended) that allows me to execute in parallel. The metaphor I'd use to describe all this is to say that I'm no longer single-threaded.

I am a big believer that right now models work best for people who are effectively running small businesses — or teams that operate lean. The work of 10 can be done by 4-5 motivated and well-armed people, or an indie like me can do every facet of the work involved and do it well. I sit down and focus on explaining the big picture with great detail, and then set things off so I can do every part of the work involved in a round-robin style.

While an engineering task is going I'm off writing my newsletter with my words but with a skill that does meaningful research for me. While I'm running some research I'm in Figma working on social media assets. While I'm doing code review for my app's code I've got the server side building in the background.

Last week I had Codex finding a domain for me, with specific requirements. (Here's a simplified version of the prompt.)

> I need a domain to represent this concept [+ 200 words], based on the code in this repository. [Code included so Codex really knows what the heck I'm building and talking about.] Don't show me any domains over $50/year at this registrar. Make sure it's a real word with no fun typos like tumblr.com is short for tumbler, and no compound words like "thisisfun.com". You can start with this list of tlds, but if you think there are any other ones that could be a good match then you can make a suggestion.

And after about 10 messages back and forth Codex found something that would have taken me far longer to research on my own — in parallel.

This all means that I'm able to write code, do marketing, design, support (which is always me and not AI), and run my business. If I plan well what I get is an extra set of hands to hand things off to, and most of the time (honestly) it does the work perfectly. But even for the times it doesn't, if it gets me 80-90% of the way there, that's a huge head start over where I would have been previously.

So the reason that I'm hesitant to answer this with a specific percentage is that your experience across organizations will vary. But I've seen in my work (solo engineering work, teaching, and consulting) is that the gains are pretty prosperous. That's true for roles where you're singularly focused on writing code — but the key is to lean into the strengths of this system and be creative about how you use it.

As I said — incapable of keeping my writing short so I hope that helps!