Some engineering problems are only painful because they happen so rarely. Even with a coding agent, the frustration still feels the same. I’ll wrestle with a tool that isn't my daily driver, hit a wall of errors, finally find a resolution, and then I neglect to note the solution because the problem is "fixed."

This happened to me recently with a custom, internal GitHub Actions workflow I use for a post-release DevRel task. To make it work, I need to pass a specific authentication token to run Entire in a headless mode.

A couple of months ago, I sat down with my AI agent to configure this for the first time. Because Entire is new and our setup is completely undocumented, it took a grueling trial-and-error process to figure out how to generate the token via a local device-flow login.

Eventually, we found the answer. I pasted the token into my GitHub secrets, the workflow turned green, and I went about my day without writing anything down. I rarely take notes now that I use coding agents, but it’s not a sustainable practice. I need something to take note of the resolution (even if it’s my agent).

Today, when the token expired, I was back at square one.