Strategy vs. Tactics

One of the major things I took away from the book The 12-Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks Than Others Do in 12 Months by Brian Moran and Michael Lennington was the concept of “Strategy” vs. “Tactics”.

In the context of the authors’ system, this largely pertains to one’s overarching goals/vision controlling the strategy of how we move through life. Whereas the day-to-day activities we take to achieve these goals are the tactics.

As I’ve leaned hard into agentic AI to both learn more and boost my output, I keep thinking of this concept. In a huge way, LLMs unlock a developer’s ability to focus on strategy far more than before. The tactics of how to debug a line of code, organize a module, or onboard to a new service have given way to the strategy of debugging systems, organizing projects, and onboarding to completely new stacks. It’s an uncertain time where the nature of development is changing, but it’s nice to recognize that as technology scales up, goals can get loftier with it.

Song On Right Now: “Please Bleed” by Ben Harper And The Innocent Criminals