There is a special kind of quiet when you open a new LEGO set. Bags with numbers. A thick booklet. Nothing built yet.
What I love about it is simple. If you follow the steps, it works. Every time. Step one, step two, step forty. At the end you have exactly the thing on the box.
Lately I think about that booklet a lot. Mostly when I work with AI coding agents.
The booklet does the hard part
People think the bricks are the clever part of LEGO. They are not. The clever part is the instructions.
Someone already decided the order. Which piece goes first. Where the hidden structure sits. Which step looks strange but holds everything together later. By the time you open the box, all the thinking is done. You just build.
An agent is very good at building. It is fast. It never gets bored. It does not mind step forty. But it does not write a good booklet for itself. Not yet, anyway.
No booklet, no model
Give a kid a box of mixed bricks and no instructions. You will get something. Maybe something fun. But not the model on the box.
That is what happens when I give an agent a vague task. "Fix the form." "Make it nicer." It builds something. It even looks confident about it. Then I spend the next hour finding out which parts are not what I meant.
The agent did not fail. It built exactly what the instructions said. The instructions just said almost nothing.
Writing the booklet first
So now I try to do the boring part first. Before the agent writes any code, I want a plan. What changes. Where. What should not change. How we will know it works.
It feels slow. It is not. A clear plan turns a long back-and-forth into one clean build. Same as LEGO. Ten minutes reading the booklet saves an hour of taking pieces apart.
Context matters too. A good LEGO booklet shows you the bricks you need for each step. An agent needs the same thing: how this code works, what the conventions are, which parts are shared and easy to break.
Check the build against the box
Even with a perfect booklet, I still look at the box picture at the end. Is it the same? Did I put that piece on the wrong side three steps ago?
With agents, this is the step I keep relearning. The build can look finished and still be wrong in small ways. A colour slightly off. A piece on the other side. In code, that is a style that breaks somewhere else, or a check that runs on a page where the code never runs.
So I compare. Not just "does it work", but "is it the thing on the box".
Free building is still fun
None of this means agents should only follow orders. Some of my favourite LEGO moments were free builds. No booklet. Just a pile and an idea.
But free building is for exploring. When I need the real thing, the one other people will use, I want the booklet.
Anyway. That is why I read the instructions now. Even the boring pages.
