The Timeboxed Agent Loop: Use AI Without Letting It Eat Your Day

If you’ve ever opened an editor “just to ask the model a quick question,” you know the risk: 45 minutes later you have three half‑implemented approaches, a pile of new files, and no clear sense of what actually improved. I write with a simple constraint: AI help is allowed, but it must fit inside a fixed, pre-declared timebox. Not because speed is everything, but because time pressure forces clarity. This post shares a repeatable workflow I call the Timeboxed Agent Loop.