Andy University coding agents for real beginners

Guide Note 2

Save Your Progress At The End

Never pay the reconstruction tax again. End each session with a handoff note for future-you.

Open the short practice promptBack To Start Here

Short Version

What this means if you are still new.

Make the agent keep one running journal plus one short open-state note. That is enough to begin compounding.

Example

Sales example: after a prep or outreach session, save what you learned, what you sent, what is blocked, and what to do before the next call.

Open a short practice prompt Use this to feel the lesson without reading the full notes first.

Pasteable Prompt

Try this today

Before we stop, write two short sections in today's journal:
1. What we did
2. What I should do next time

Keep it short enough that tomorrow-me can restart without stress.

This is the shortest possible action that lets you feel the lesson in practice.

Longer Notes

Open the full guide notes only when you want more depth.

This keeps Andy's original longer write-up available without forcing all of it onto a first-time visitor.

Open the full notes for guide note 2 Andy calls this session close. This is the longer original version.

The reason most AI workflows don't compound: nothing persists.

You spend 90 minutes building something good — a plan, a draft, an insight. The session ends. Two weeks later you open a new session and start from scratch. Not because the work was lost, but because you can't efficiently load the context. So you reconstruct.

Reconstruction is a tax. The better your work gets, the higher the tax. Session close eliminates it.

The Technique

At the end of every session, before closing:

1. Raw dump — write everything that happened to a dated file. No curation. What you worked on, what decisions were made, what was left open. 5 minutes. Not for you to read carefully — for a future session to scan.

2. Open state — a separate, shorter document: what's the current state of the work? What's done, in progress, blocked? What does the next session need to know to start without reconstructing?

3. Save everything — commit files if you're in a file-based system. Export or screenshot anything you'd be upset to lose from a chat session.

The Open State Template

Date: [date]
What I was working on: [one sentence]
Where I am: [current state — what's done, what's in progress]
What to do next: [top 3 actions, prioritized]
What's blocked: [if anything]
What future-me needs to know: [context that isn't obvious from the files]

The open state is written for a reader who has zero context. That constraint forces you to write what actually matters, not a narrative. When you sit down for the next session, you load the open state first. Read it. Decide if this is still the right direction. Then work.

The Reframe

You're not closing for yourself. You're closing for next-session-you, who will not remember what you knew today.

This reframe matters because closing at the end of a session when you're tired feels like extra work. The reframe makes it a handoff — you're being responsible to someone who depends on you.

Practice

At the end of this session, write an open state document for the constitution you built in Lesson 1.

Completion criteria: An open state document exists with today's date. In your next session, you load it before starting. It saves you reconstruction time.

The Habit

The most common failure: you finish a session, it's late, you skip the close. Then again. Then the habit is never formed.

The close takes 5-10 minutes. The reconstruction it prevents takes 30-60 minutes. The math is obvious. The discipline is in treating the close as non-negotiable — not something you do when you remember to.