The speed at which coding agents are improving, specifically over the final few months of 2025, has been mind boggling, particularly with Claude Opus 4.5, and conversations about this momentum continue to teem on X. It’s a really exciting time.

As we close out 2025 tonight, the new reality is that any product-minded, entrepreneurial, formerly “10x” software engineer has been handed a 5-10x multiplier. TThis multiplier doesn’t just have to do with code or running multiple agents in parallel, either. It reaches into engineering process definition and speed, product requirements definition and GTM speed, design, marketing, enterprise sales, and so much more. So when these traits are found in an engineer and multiplied, the opportunities truly are endless, hence the pretty realistic 100x effect.

I’ll speak more on the agentic side of things soon and share a few of my code process optimizations below — and am cooking on my next startup in that very space — but in thinking about my coding and building velocity as an engineer and everything I do especially today with agents to optimize that, I realized how much of my life outside of my computer is heavily optimized, too.

So here’s everything I do to operate at 100x, and the mantras that get me there. It’s exactly what I do to feel healthy, think clearly, sustain meaningful relationships, and build, build, build.

Mindset

Mindset is the foundation our thought and behavior as humans sits upon. Here are some of the mantras I’ve used to cultivate the mindset I have today. I do really just repeat these to myself or read them over and over: they’re at the top of my Notion. The most important factor to me is sustaining a sense of extremely high agency over my personal and professional lives. I can really build or do anything if I can think it.

• “Everybody want to be a bodybuilder but nobody wants to lift heavy ass weights.” – Ronnie Coleman and repeated endlessly among software startup acolytes. One of my favorites.
• You can just do things. Get something done.
• Make things happen: be willful, determined, focus on execution, don’t give up, problem solve anything, and believe in yourself.
• It’s incredibly hard, the outcome is completely uncertain, and there will continue to be an immense amount of struggle: but that’s the point.
• High expectations create high performance. When you’re expected to be brilliant, you rise to the occasion. Expect the best from yourself and others and anything is possible.
• Optimism combined with high agency is incredibly potent, and spaces that cultivate it are an honor and a privilege to work within.
• “We should not look back unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors, and for the purpose of profiting by dearly bought experience.” – George Washington
• Confidence comes from preparation and practice.
• You’re supposed to feel overwhelmed. Anxiety is a useful signal to move more strongly in a specific direction.
• When all else fails, get better sleep. You’ll trust your mindset more after good sleep.

Physical

• Track my sleep with Rise, soon Eight Sleep
• Intensive, cardio inducing Vinyasa Yoga classes with the best instructors in Manhattan, 3-4x per week
• Strength training 2x per week on top of Vinyasa Yoga
• Aim for a minimum of 40 minutes walking daily, which is fairly easy in New York, and Audible non-fiction or TBPN podcast (hilarious) while I walk
• Delicious homemade food or high quality meals at NYC restaurants
• No more than 2 drinks per week, most weeks none, no other substances
• Red light therapy 3-5 times a week at my desk
• Sauna sessions followed by cold plunge 2 times per week at a favorite location in New York

Here are the supplements I take daily:

• Creatine: focus, restfulness, energy — I take this one everyday in a shot of fresh orange juice (helps with absorption) and is the one I make sure to get every day even if I forget the others
• Super EPA Fish Oil
• Beekeeper’s Naturals Propolis + Vitamin C Liposomal — As soon as I start to feel sick, I take this or their throat spray repeatedly
• An assortment of probiotics and multi-vitamins
• Magnesium Glycinate and Theanine at bed time

Daily Routine

Morning

• Wake with the sun, usually around 7am, sunlight in the eyes first thing especially if I’ve been traveling
• Hue lights timed alarm, wake up “naturally” each day
• Nature sounds first thing on my AirPods Max
• Read the morning’s headlines, tech Twitter
• Schedule my workout classes for the next morning
• First sprint of work
• 2 eggs or other high-protein, take supplements
• Workout

Day

• Remaining sprints of work
• Set aside one hour for an early dinner, including preparation which is meditative for me. All groceries delivered via Whole Foods via Amazon. Other supplies via Instacart.

Afternoon into Evening

• End of day: startup work, discussion with Opus 4.5, with Cursor Ultra, inside my Obsidian project for tracking thought (I do this throughout the day as well)
• Lights out by 12am
• Meaningful time with friends one night a week, usually making us dinner or out to eat

Repeat work days six days per week. One full day off usually on Sundays to focus on workouts, sauna, cooking, and rejuvenation… but most weeks I work that day, too.

Work

• Everything is tracked in Notion — I plan out each day days or a week before, and bigger things are planned earlier. I review the next day’s plan nightly so everything is clear and ready in the morning.
• I have Cursor setup to version all of my thoughts in Obsidian and chat with Opus 4.5 about all of my thinking around my startup, plus execution, or about my agency work.
• I chat with Claude to find areas of improvement after it analyzes my Gmail, Notion and Linear.
• I review code with the help of CodeRabbit which can process requirements for the tickets I’ve specified in detail for my dev teams and confirm whether all of the requirements are complete, and tag specifics if not. Plus a litany of performance and other critical checks, especially for frontend.
• I unblock dev questions, discuss through sticky parts with them in Linear: Linear is the source of truth which makes conversations both easy to find and easy to solve.
• I leverage Figma MCP to build specifications in new Linear tickets for dev teams, analyzing designs and discussing with product, visual and UX design teams to find edge cases and define logic.
• I build supporting dev docs into Linear that are further leveraged by CodeRabbit and other MCP enabled systems that make my job as Head of Engineering a lot easier, which also translates into better value and quality for our clients, too.

When I’m working on client projects at Pattern, the majority of my day is actually spent talking directly with clients, whether in a sales context or ongoing project review and discussion or handoff. I distill business conversations into technical requirements and vice versa. The other large chunk is spent on internal meetings with various teams, usually on our full build projects. When I’m not doing any of those things, I’m setting up process to make everything move more smoothly for our developers, our agents, our project managers, and all other teams.

Downtime

I do infuse “downtime” during my day by reading, writing, or sometimes playing a film towards the end of day in the background when I rev on code-related work. I cook often, which I love. I make homemade bone broth often, and I rarely follow recipes these days and simply cook what I crave.

I move quickly when cooking, keeping my kitchen clean as I work. Everything is planned ahead of time, including Amazon Wholefoods groceries dropped at my door. I derive an incredible amount of joy from cooking for friends and family, too, and make time for hosting these dinners as often as I’m able.

Environment & Aesthetics

• I keep my apartment incredibly neat and well curated with things that fuel my imagination and flow including original art, my diploma from Barnard, plants, and lots and lots of books. I also recently added a Phoenix comic from my incredible friend Dylan Mekhi got my recently as a point of inspiration.
• I light candles every night.
• I take a lot of pride in what I wear. I’m typically very comfortable, very warm in the winter. I buy high-quality pieces that last a long time. I love to dress formally when the occasion calls for it.

Pragmatism & Consistency

One of the overarching guides to my daily habits is to be pragmatic about needing to making compromises: sometimes I don’t get that long walk in because I’m really revving hard on my startup work and have great momentum, and that’s OK. I take nothing to extremes, and I do my best to recalibrate as I go. And I find that this pragmatism leads to the sustainable consistency I need to operate at my highest level.