Let your coding agent keep your brag document

Twice a year a text box appears and asks what I accomplished in the last six months. Every time, I look at it the way I look at a form asking for my blood type: I know there is an answer, I know it is important, and I have absolutely no idea what it is.

There is a well-known cure for this, called a brag document, and it works. Its one weakness is that you have to keep it up, which requires remembering to, which is the exact part of the brain that failed in the first place. Your coding agent, on the other hand, was there for all of it. It read the code, wrote half the commits and opened the pull requests. It is the best-placed witness you have, and it does not get bored on Fridays.

This post is what a brag document is, the half of it your agent can write, the half it cannot, a template, and a weekly prompt you can paste. Facts are linked to their sources and were checked on 3 October 2026. The last section is about the thing I build, and it says so.

🦚 What a brag document is

Julia Evans made it famous in 2019, in a post called Get your work recognized: write a brag document. She describes the feeling every review season brings, "wait, what did I do in the last 6 months?", and the fix: keep a running document of what you did, so that at review time you are reading rather than remembering. Her manager's reaction to the first one is the best argument for it: "this makes my job way easier, now I can look at the document when writing your perf review instead of trying to remember what happened".

That is the point people miss. If you do not remember everything you did, your manager certainly does not, and they are the one who has to argue for you in a room you are not in. A brag document is not vanity. It is evidence, handed to your lawyer before the trial.

Gergely Orosz calls the same habit a work log and gives it a cadence: "Every week, record key work items you've worked on: key code changes, code reviews, design documents, discussions and planning, helping out others, postmortems and anything else that took time, and has impact."