My Agents Never Get Tired. I Do: On Satisficing

I approved a prompt on a Tuesday morning and went to make a cup of Irish breakfast tea. By the time I came back the block was done, tested, and more thorough than what I had asked for. I stood there with the mug and realized I had never decided whether that thoroughness belonged in that block. I had not really decided on the block either. Sixty-two public repositories since July 2025. Three hackathon wins, two challenge wins, two talks on AI in the public sector, and a weekday job running court operations for the county. Kiro, the agent that writes my code, does not get tired. Neither does Claude, which reviews it. I do, and I keep working through it anyway. I have not fixed this. I am still in it. Most of what I see us talk about is speed. Faster down the road, faster through the build, faster into the code. Faster is good. There are only so many hours in a day and we are maintaining, prototyping, and sprinting through all of them. What I have not seen much of is how to set up an ending, or how to decide what deserves a beginning. Have you? I tagged a folder throwaway and we shipped it production-grade Short version, and the long one is here if you missed it. Block Zero on Porch Light , a civic tool that reads Ventura's public meeting agendas, existed to answer one question. Does the stack deploy. I tagged the folder [THROWAWAY] that morning and budgeted two hours. It took a build day. By the end there was a byte-identity test protecting a vendored logging module, exact dependency pinning, and a sync script with drift detection, all inside a folder already marked for deletion. Kiro proposed them. Claude reviewed and did not object. I approved them. Each decision was defensible on its own. What I did not have then was a reason, beyond nobody checking the tag. I had gone into that build determined not to over-engineer, and over-engineered anyway. Mikhail , in the comments, put his finger on why that is worth saying out loud: knowing about a trap is not immunity to it