The five-minute rule
Artifact: the precise question your brain forms after five minutes of sitting with the problem
1. The rule
When you're stuck, the rule is:
Think about it for five minutes before asking AI for the answer.
Not thirty minutes. Not "until I figure it out." Five. Five real minutes, with no other tabs open, no other tasks, just you and the problem.
This rule is calibrated. Less than five minutes and you reach for AI on instinct — every problem becomes someone else's problem before your brain has a chance to engage with it. More than thirty minutes and you grind for hours on something the AI could have unblocked in a paragraph.
Five minutes is the sweet spot: long enough for your brain to actually load the problem, short enough that you're not punishing yourself.
2. Why this works
In the first five minutes of a stuck moment, your brain is doing something invisible but important: forming the question. Articulating exactly what you don't understand. Surveying what you've already tried. Naming the part that's strange.
If you skip those five minutes and ask immediately, the AI gets a fuzzy question and gives you a fuzzy answer, which you accept because you didn't know what you were looking for. The session feels productive and changes nothing.
If you spend the five minutes first, the question you ask is precise. "Why is my hook running twice in dev mode but once in production?" is a different question from "why doesn't my hook work?" The first question pulls back a useful answer. The second pulls back a tutorial you'll close after two paragraphs.
3. The other half of the rule
The five minutes have an upper bound for a reason. After about thirty minutes of being stuck on the same micro-problem, you cross from productive thinking into spiraling, and the marginal value of more grinding is negative.
When you hit that wall, ask. Confidently. With the precise question you've formed. Use teacher mode. Get unstuck. Move on.
There is no virtue in grinding past thirty minutes on a problem the AI could clarify in two paragraphs. That's not engineering — that's pride, and pride is not a feature of seniors. Seniors ask quickly, after they've earned the question.