25 MAY 2026
David decided: Delegation rule: cross heaven and earth before asking the user to do anything
David codified a standing rule for his AI agents: before asking him to run a command, find a secret, or perform an action, the agent must first have exhausted every way to do it itself.
Frustrated with agents asking him to handle Stripe setup, secret hunting, and deploys he had already delegated, David wrote the rule out:
before you ask me to do something, ask yourself "have i crossed heaven and earth first to try do this myself?" if not, then dont ask me and just do it
He repeated the pattern across the day, telling agents to find secrets in the therapa-upstream repo themselves, use the Stripe CLI themselves, do Clerk and Cloudflare work themselves, and handle migrations and registrations themselves. The directive sets the default to autonomous execution; asking the human is the fallback, not the first move.