How I'm Using AI Agents to Boost Free Will
The project of a Software Engineer, Meditator, and Autodidact
Since we (supposedly) only “have 36 months to escape the permanent underclass,” maybe what we each need is an agentic development.
What do I mean? As an example, the working WatchOS App (SwiftUI frontend, FastAPI Python backend) I built in two weeks by collaborating with and supervising AI Agents—which quietly helps me avoid self-sabotage via self-care.
For the unfamiliar, the “permanent underclass” meme has grown roots in the AI community. It’s being passed around among people who are convinced that the invention of Agentic AI systems—those which can operate without human supervision—that are advanced enough to make all human labor obsolete will inevitably lead to an insurmountable wealth and lifestyle disparity.
A disparity that makes our current enormous and tenuous divide between haves and have-nots seem Marxist by comparison.
These enthusiasts suspect we’ll have AI assisted elites, or maybe transhumans who have been augmented by machines, or maybe the best word is simply “Gods,” lording over the tech illiterate rabble.
Where does this publication come in?
Its title, “An Agentic Development,” has a double meaning:
I am attempting to use the sophomoric versions of AI Agents that are currently available to develop software.
The software being developed is an app or two that will act as supplemental material to a course that I am working on—called APTITUDE—that distills my research into what it means to develop agency.
So we’re ratcheting up our Free Will—the ability to decide to do something and then flawlessly follow through—by choosing to code a few apps with AI’s help.
What is the deal with the APTITUDE Course?
APTITUDE is
Adepthood: Praxis and Theory for Integrating, Transcending, and Unbridling from Determinism Effectively.
You can read more about it at its home website, https://aptitude.guru.
APTITUDE is the user manual to my mind. I developed it in order to be a more effective husband, father, friend, employee, and, generally, contributor to civilization.
I developed it because at some point I woke up to the reality that everything was vying for my attention. Social Media, alcohol, sweets, certain relationships, my own Jungian Shadow. I recognized the ways each of them were manipulating me. Were hijacking my best intentions and generating suffering and self-sabotage.
I developed APTITUDE because I wanted a way to be sure that I was acting in alignment with the basic goodness that I know we each possess.
Again, it’s the user manual for my own mind... *I just don’t believe that my mind is special enough that no one else could benefit.*
All you need to know for now is that it is based on
- 20 years of talk therapy
- 15 years of meditation practice
- 5 years of deep, deliberate research
- 50+ books
- Ken Wilber’s Integral Philosophy (you can think of Adepthood as a Free Will “line of intelligence” in Wilber’s AQAL framework)
- Clare Graves’ Spiral Dynamics (Free Will, I argue, develops through the Stages outlined in SDi)
- Ashtanga Yoga, Buddhism, Depth Psychology, Magick, Mysticism, Neuroscience, Vedanta and more
What will you find here?
Zero guru bullshit. I don’t know better than you. No one does. You know yourself best. The frameworks and philosophies and even coding tips that I will provide should be tested in the crucible of your lived experience and anything that doesn’t work should be immediately jettisoned with no reservations.
Still, you’ll find value in this publication if you are attempting to develop agency or develop software with AI agents.
As I build the apps that will accompany APTITUDE, you’ll get to learn from my mistakes, insights, and epiphanies as I teach myself tools like OpenAI’s Codex and ChatGPT, Claude Code, and Cursor.
And while I have 7 years of experience coding professionally, this will also be an experiment to see if I can actually learn from what I’m doing in order to transition my career from what amounts to “Junior Developer” to a full-on Full-Stack Engineer.
In other words, I am not going to be Vibe Coding.
Wherever possible, I am treating the AI Agents I spin up like a team of Junior Devs that I am personally leading. Where I find myself beyond the depth afforded to me by professional experience, I am binge-learning Full-Stack Engineering concepts and lingo.
I’ll share my techniques for getting the Agents to adhere to best practices, and I’ll share my strategies for developing your own competence from studying the actual good ideas AI has.
You might also expect some book reviews. Some of the books I’ve read to prepare for the coding interview that I hope will be generated through all this work have been incredibly helpful (like Grokking Algorithms by Aditya Y Bhargava), not just for grinding LeetCode but for all my pair programming with Anthropic and OpenAI.
Won’t you join the journey?
If all that sounds like fun, please do subscribe.
Let’s develop our agency together with a little help from the agents that the future Gods are still letting us play with. Let’s figure out how to be Sovereign so we can do what we came here to, rather than what everything is manipulating us into wanting.
Let’s learn, let’s grow, and let’s build something: our own comfortable future.