Say What You Mean by “Push.”
Some words make things happen. Pin down what you mean by them once, and never argue about them again.
“Push it to production.”
Make it live. Then save it safely, even though I didn't say so.
I want to show a friend.
The day I started this course, Lesson 1 was sitting on my test site, the private copy only I can see. I wanted a friend to see it. So I asked my lead agent, the one I call the maestro.
Maestro, can we push “Gonna is fine” to production? I want to show a friend.
Yes, it's on its way to production now. […]
It will send you the live link and a screenshot as soon as it's up, so you can show your friend right away. […]
Eight minutes later:
Gonna Is Fine is live: […]
I checked it myself. The page loads on the main address, and the www address forwards there correctly. It has Lesson 1 and the full 17-lesson course map, and it's saved to GitHub. […]
Read the last four words again. I never asked for that. I didn't have to.
Live isn't the same as safe.
Here's the trap, in plain words. When I say “push to production,” I mean make it live: put it where the public can see it. But in programmer talk, “push” means something else entirely. It means uploading your saved work to GitHub, an online vault that keeps every version of your project so nothing is ever lost.
Those are two separate jobs, and doing one doesn't do the other. A site can be live and working beautifully while the only copy of the latest version sits on one computer. My bible says it flat out:
“These two words mean different, independent things in Mike's usage, and conflating them is how live sites drift out of sync with GitHub.”
That's not a theory. The note that tells the story of that rule says what happened when nobody had pinned it:
“This is exactly what left 28 repos uncommitted (their work was deployed from disk, never saved to GitHub).”
Twenty-eight projects. Live on the web, looking great, and not saved anywhere safe. One bad day for that computer, and GitHub would have had nothing newer to give back. Nobody did anything wrong on purpose. Everyone assumed that live meant safe, and it didn't.
So I wrote down my dictionary.
Now there's a short section in my bible (that's the standing file from Lesson 20) that every agent reads before it does anything. In plain words, it says:
- “Push to dev” or “push to production” means make it live on the test site or the real one.
- “Commit,” said by itself, means save it to GitHub, all the way, so it's safe.
- They're separate. In the bible's words, “one NEVER implies the other.”
And then there's my favorite line, because it's about me:
“Mike's own habit is to ask for the deploy and sometimes forget the commit; close that gap for him.”
Guilty. So every time something goes live, my agents save it to GitHub too, whether I remember to say so or not. That's what happened the morning I wanted to show my friend. When I do remember, it sounds like this:
Looks good. Push the slide-in card to production and commit.
[…] from the exact commit, so production now matches GitHub. […]
Ten words from me. No back-and-forth about which “push” I meant, because that was settled long before, in writing.
Pin the meaning. Let the wrapping go.
This whole course says your agent can handle your sloppy English, and it can. Here's how I said yes to one redesign:
“[…] amazing! push that puppy to production!”
No agent of mine wondered what a puppy was doing in production. The wrapping can be as loose as you like. What gets pinned is the core: the handful of words that make something happen you can't easily undo. Going live. Sending. Deleting. Spending. “Done.” “Approved.”
And sometimes you invent a word on the spot. This month I needed a way to say “this matters more than everything else,” and about one of my projects I said:
“[…] is in the top tier of priorities. I was going to say top priority, but by tomorrow night there'll be 3 others, so let's just have an S tier and anything in the S tier we make sure we're always hot on it, always cooking”
My agent wrote down what “S tier” means right away: anything in it always has someone working on it, and it gets checked first. Now every agent knows the word, and I never have to explain it again.
That's the last move of the course's spine, made permanent. Your agent infers what you mean; you confirm the decisions. A pinned word is a decision you confirm once, for good.
If a word makes something happen, define it once.
Write down what it does, what it doesn't do, and what should always follow it. Put that in your standing file. Then talk however you like.
Write your own little dictionary.
Ten minutes, and your agent does most of it.
- Ask your agent to find your risky words.
Paste this into a chat where you've done real work together, so it has examples to go on.
Help me pin down my vocabulary. From our conversations and from what you know about my work, list the words and phrases I use that make something happen: publishing, sending, deleting, spending, saving, calling something done or approved. For each one, tell me what you think I mean by it, what else it could mean to someone else, and what could go wrong if you guessed the other meaning. Then ask me to confirm or correct each one, one at a time. - Turn the answers into definitions.
One line each, in your words: what it means, what it doesn't mean, and what always follows it. “When I say send it, show me the final version first.”
- Put them in your standing file.
Add them to the bible from Lesson 20, under a heading like “What my words mean.”
- Name the step you always forget.
Everyone has one. Mine is saving after going live. Write it down as a job for your agent: “After X, always do Y, even if I don't say so.”
Talk as loosely as you like, but give every word that makes something happen one meaning, written down once, and let your agent finish the step you always forget.
Back It Up First
Before an agent changes anything, it copies it. Every time, and somewhere the copy can't leak.
Every exchange on this page really happened and is quoted exactly, slips included; […] marks where I trimmed. Lines from my bible and studio notes are quoted exactly too. Times are Eastern. My agent here is Claude, made by Anthropic.