alt Hacker NewsI find it interesting that so many of my friends resonate with this. I… don’t, really.
I only ever have 2-4 opencode/claude tabs open at once. And I use them for consistent tasks. There’s no way I’d be able to keep track otherwise. I have an “email reviewer” terminal, and a “doc maker” terminal, and 1-2 “coding” terminals.
But I don’t start a half dozen things simultaneously (which is ironic, because I have ADHD). I don’t feel the need to maximize my efficiency with AI. I also don’t lament the ideas / things I start but don’t finish; that has been my life, lol - see the aforementioned ADHD. So why should I start caring about my half-finished projects now, just because I sunk some tokens into them?
I spent an entire day the other day trying to use an LLM to help me automate something manual and tedious, and it was a failure. Did nothing but waste time in the end. Perhaps it’s those experiences (of which I’ve had plenty) that help me realize the limitations?
I don’t feel like it should make me more productive; it does, because I can offload random tasks that I do not have to be the one to do (“find the function where this happens” or “find all the laundromats in the cities I’m going to”) but I use it for research like that, and not so much “do my taxes for me.”
That’s why I paid a guy to do my taxes. I don’t feel this “need” for sending everything into AI. And just because I can use it to do anything myself… why should I?
There are two caveats:
1) when I’m directly working on something, I don’t want to leave it. I’m hyperfocused on it. But that’s true even without AI; I would have been obsessed with building doughflow.app were it for AI or not. The difference is I may never have finished it without AI.
2) I find myself using it as a crutch sometimes for simple things like sending a message to a colleague. I don’t like that, and have been trying to avoid it. I’ve spent all my life writing naturally, and I don’t need someone to proofread my chats. That’s a habit I am tossing, in general.
Perhaps it is the ADHD that actually helps me focus; that is, perhaps the coping mechanisms built for managing my countless disparate thoughts also work for managing multiple disparate agents? Just thinking out loud.
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I’ve never been diagnosed with ADHD but this comment hits home. I also struggle to juggle multiple tasks and I’ve had to build a lot of personal strategies to be productive at my job. Otherwise I’d stay scatterbrained and never get anything done.
Things like drawing small defined boundaries, understanding where and how to delegate, and forcing myself to “hyperfocus” on 1-2 tasks at once. My strategy with building revolves around offloading mental context as fast as possible and into sequential, modular pieces. It’s made me a much better systems thinker. However, because of that I also don’t really see the point in running more than 1-2 coding agents at once. Others I work with don’t relate and are trying to parallelize as much as they can.
Part of me is concerned that this way of thinking isn’t compatible with the new wave of agentic SWE and these skills will become outdated. Or maybe it’s actually all converging back and is more valuable than ever.
Probably because with fewer tabs, you actually get to do the deeper thinking that you enjoy? With more, you're constrained to quickly converging on the best way to keep the plate spinning
I have many projects going, many tmux sessions, but I also found I don't resonate with the post either. Yes, there are times I use AI and it doesn't go anywhere and wasn't necessary but I don't think I can always know that ahead of time. The point is the overall pattern and the actual of useful work.
I am much more able to use fragmented bits of time now. Whereas before if I had 20 minutes here and there I would not be able to even read code or notes in order to get context enough to make a change let alone do real work.
I suspect personality matters. Often in discussions with AI or anyone I tend to take opiate position and constantly challenge and dig in. I don't go with the flow. With people this can be problematic. With AI it merely takes more time but probably a avoids some pitfalls.
Yeah. I dont have ADHD, but doing many tasks at once is a great way for me to lower my own attention span, make my own attentiveness worst. It is as if doing multiple tasks at once was a great way to put non-ADHD brain into temporary adhd-lite state. (Temporary, because when I stop multitasking, it reverses back over time).
Pre-AI, I worked on projects where people tended to multitask and juggle many tasks at once. They felt productive, they worked a lot and hard and felt they are treated unfairly when outsiders complained about slow speed. Except that, their overall speed was extremely slow, really.
I'm in a similar situation is you are, having ADHD, and my observations have been similar. I've been more hestiant to use AI at all for a while at the beginning but even now I only ever use it for one thing at a time. It helps me tremendously with the things I want to have done but not do - find out who clutters my home directory, build a small DMS plugin for local models, stuff like that. But even if I work on a bigger task and idea, it's mostly one thing I use it for at a time.
Maybe you're right in the fact that the coping mechanism help with that. Maybe using LLMs is similar in that it is easy to lose focus for neurotypicals so having lived with that we know how to handle it. Or maybe it's just us, who knows.