There’s a reason painters put up signs.
Wet paint. Do not touch.
Not because they hate you.
Because a half-dry surface is fragile in a specific way: one helpful finger can ruin an hour of careful work.
AI-assisted building has its own version of wet paint.
It’s the moment the model is mid-run, mid-refactor, mid-feature, mid-implementation, and you feel the urge to intervene.
You see something you don’t like, so you correct it immediately.
You think of a new requirement, so you add it immediately.
You notice a naming detail, so you fix it immediately.
And because the interface is a chat box, your intervention feels harmless.
It’s just a message.
But messages are not harmless when the work depends on coherence.
The Problem
We interrupt because we care.
We interrupt because we’ve been trained to catch mistakes early.
We interrupt because the model is fast enough that it feels like we can steer in real time.
The temptation is understandable.
It’s also one of the most reliable ways to create chaos.
The Chat Interface Lies to You
Chat makes everything look like a conversation.
Conversations are naturally interruptible.
You can stop someone mid-sentence, add a thought, change direction, and everyone still knows what’s happening.
Software work is not like that.
When someone is halfway through a refactor, they are holding a temporary mental model:
- old structure
- new structure
- what has been migrated
- what has not
- which files are in flux
You can interrupt, but you are interrupting a process that depends on continuity.
If you’ve ever watched an engineer get derailed by “one quick question” during a delicate change, you already know the shape of this problem.
The Smear Pattern
Mid-stream prompting tends to create the same failures over and over:
- half-applied patterns (some files updated, others not)
- contradictory constraints (“refactor aggressively” / “keep changes minimal”)
- broken invariants (types updated in one place, not another)
- patchwork code (new approach glued onto old approach)
You end up with output that is technically present but structurally incoherent.
And incoherence is what costs you time.
Not the initial mistake.
The incoherence that makes mistakes hard to locate and hard to undo.
You Become the Bottleneck Without Realizing It
The other cost is subtler.
When you interrupt constantly, you keep yourself in a state of perpetual supervision.
You never let the run finish.
You never get a clean diff to review.
You never get the calm moment where the work is done and you can switch from creation to evaluation.
Instead you are half-building and half-reviewing at the same time.
That mixed mode is where anxiety lives.
The Solution (The Calm Way)
Non-interference doesn’t mean passivity.
It means sequence.
First define.
Then execute.
Then review.
If you mix the phases, you mix the output.
Treat the Run Like a Flight
There is a reason aviation has checklists and phases.
Not because pilots are weak.
Because complex systems punish improvisation.
AI runs are similar. The model can generate fast, but the system is still complex.
So you adopt a simple discipline:
- Set the destination before takeoff.
- Don’t rewrite the route mid-air.
- Review when you land.
If you must change the destination, you don’t shout from the passenger seat.
You update the plan, then start a new flight.
The Practical Pattern: One Coherent Run
Here’s what non-interference looks like in practice:
-
Write the current task as a small artifact.
Define “done.” Define constraints. List edge cases. -
Ask the model to implement the task in one coherent pass.
No “and also…” mid-way. No incremental steering. -
Let it finish.
This is the hard part. You will feel the urge to check constantly. -
Review the diff against the artifact.
Accept, reject, or revise the artifact and rerun.
It sounds almost too simple.
That’s the point.
Simplicity is how you keep your mind clean.
Use a “Parking Lot” for Your Interruptions
If you try this, you will immediately notice something:
Your brain keeps generating new ideas while the model is working.
That’s normal.
The Operator move is to capture those ideas without injecting them into the wet paint.
Create a parking lot:
- “Rename this variable later.”
- “Consider extracting this to a shared component.”
- “We might need a new error state.”
Then decide after the run whether they matter.
Most of them won’t.
That alone will save you more time than any prompting trick.
The Interruption Budget
If you want a more concrete rule:
Give yourself an interruption budget of one.
You are allowed to stop the run once, only if you see a foundational mistake:
- wrong architecture
- wrong tech choice
- security issue
- a decision that violates a hard constraint
Not style.
Not naming.
Not “I would’ve done it differently.”
Those can wait for review.
This rule trains you to distinguish between “important” and “urgent.”
Most interruptions are urgent.
The Post-It Note Analogy walks through the small artifacts that keep work aligned without forcing you to poke at a run mid-flight.
When the run is done and you need a calm way to judge the output, Review Is a Contract gives you the template for evaluating without slipping back into mid-stream steering.
Very few are important.
Why This Works Emotionally
Non-interference reduces the number of times you switch modes.
Mode-switching is the hidden energy drain.
When you let a run finish, you get to be in one mode at a time:
- define
- execute
- review
This is calmer for you and clearer for the model.
And clarity is not just a quality issue.
It is a wellbeing issue.
Conclusion
The goal is not to watch every brushstroke.
The goal is to get a clean painting.
So the next time you feel the itch to correct the model mid-run, ask yourself:
Am I fixing something fundamental, or am I touching the wet paint because I’m anxious?
Write your thought down.
Let the run land.
Then review with a clear head and a clean surface.
Most of the time, you’ll find that the calm approach is not slower.
It’s the first approach that actually finishes.