Recently, I have found myself feeling nostalgic for P2. P2 is a tool crafted by a previous employer that allowed documentation and communication across teams. The micro-blogging product allowed long form discussion to happen by being easy to use, having tags for individuals, a robust notification system, and making most things searchable. It was a verb as much as a product. The company culture was embedded with it, to the point that “If it isn’t in P2, it doesn’t exist”.
As someone who has kept a journal for more of my life than not, writing out my thoughts has always been a way to process what is happening and next steps. Aside from the in-the-moment-brain-dump benefit, these writings have acted as record keepers. I can piece together how I got where I am today by seeing where I was before. Oftentimes, passing of time and new experience allow me to look back at an earlier period of my life with a different insight. Patterns and issues I was blind to become illuminated with a reflective perspective.
Currently, my day-to-day work is heavy in interaction with LLMs. It feels like I am writing more than ever. At the same time, it seems easy to lose the context thread. I keep finding myself wishing for a place to look back, a desire to just “P2”.
When I stopped to examine why, more than a year later, I still feel the loss of this tool, I realized it was more about a practice than it was about the tool.
Long form writing forces clarity of thought.
My opinion is that LLM’s encourage brevity. The harnesses and UIs that allow us to interact have short message boxes. The prompting and direction are meant to be a conversation. The models themselves do better with specificity over vagueness.
P2, blogging, and journaling all force me to stop and think long enough to create a fully fleshed out piece of prose. This pausing, writing, and editing cycle creates a more distinct picture not only for the reader, but in my own mind. The action of fully describing a problem can often illuminate its solution, often called rubber-ducking in the tech world. And, of course, there is the aphorism that you don’t really understand a topic until you can teach it, or for my illustration, write about it.
So here are some rituals and communication hygiene I am experimenting with to make sure I don’t lose clarity in pursuit of speed.
- Stop, drop, and prompt — I am instructing my agents to push back every time I start a new session. They should drop the shortened session start message and ask for a more in depth version. The pushback will require me to describe the prompt more fully, giving me time to really clarify the issue for myself and the agent.
- Pay attention to one session at a time — I often find myself jumping between multiple session threads. It gets easy to do when you the current agent session is working and you can just open a new tab to start a second thread. The goal isn’t to stop concurrent agent work but to stop context switching in the middle of a task.
- Maintain an un-siloed context stash — I have a journal for each customer (the main context I am responsible for) with dated MD files. Decisions, communications, and working sessions all get a note. It doesn’t have to be comprehensive, it just has to track the history of the customer in one place. This is all stored in a place where anyone from the company can access it.
- Encourage adversarial agents — I work in a small company. Oftentimes, the only eyes on work in progress are my own. Rather than having agents who passively agree, I encourage them to challenge what I prompt.
I don’t think that P2 is the right tool or culture for every company, but I know the ritual of long form writing is beneficial to me and my work. I am finding my own way to implement clarity in daily life.
If P2 sounds interesting an you would like to experiment with a P2-like product, another nostalgic A8c alumni has created a version you can manage on your own: https://github.com/georgestephanis/p2026
Or you can sign up for the hosted version at https://wordpress.com/p2
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