How I Fight AI Brain Fry

I thought you’re supposed to roll around on your chair swordfighting while your agents are agenting.

Its funny that there isnt a word yet to describe these moments where one waits for the agent to finish its work, something which has taken over our whole work experience nowadays

Maybe vibe-idling? Videling? Vibeling?

Good heavens, you have to write your own harness, orchestrate a few agents, and recursively self-improve your agents with the express goal of completely remove yourself from the equation. I will not stare into an abyss of my own creation. plan your time and drive your agents, not the otherway around. will it be slower? you'd be suprised how much you don't care when you let the stormtroopers finish your 2nd deathstar.

Thought it was “How I'm fighting the AI Brian Ferry”. Sad it wasn’t that. (Bryan, I know.)

HN hug of death strikes again.

I still do LeetCode problems occasionally. It feels weird to write code and work through complex logic manually again, but I think it's more crucial than ever these days. It's like physical exercise. If you don't use your brain and keep challenging yourself, your problem-solving skills will eventually atrophy.

Not trying to be rude, but I think if you had read about DeepSeek's superagents blog, you would not have to build this.

IMO This is a solved problem. You just have to find the solution and use it.

Super agent prototype. You can tell your Clanker to install this and set it up for you on the laptop: https://github.com/deepseek-ai/dsh-superagent-prototype

I have successfully used this on my own workstation, which then I manage via Discord, as well as my work in a startup. At work I have this installed on a Hetzner VPS, which then connects to Slack and GitHub. Works like a charm, with deepseek pricing.

I appreciate, recognise and share the sentiment here, but I also recognise massive loadbearing claudisms??

I read this and I think, OK, that seems like a strategy. And then a bit of my brain says "dude, dude, you've seen Metropolis right?"

Sounds miserable

It's funny watching people slowly (re-)discover that a kanban board seems like a good idea for agentic coding.

Why people all of sudden try to behave like an octopus? Never understood this. Even if you use just one window, you are already much more productive than ever. This heavy multitasking will burn you out in no time.

I go about this somewhat differently.

First, having forced breaks in your coding activity is not something new. Heck, there is even an XKCD about it: https://xkcd.com/303/

What I did under these circumstances was to think ahead, revisiting code, examining my assumptions. (Obviously, not swordfighting. :) ) Also, note that compilation delays do not go away just because an agent kicks off builds.

This still keeps working for me, as I mostly use agents as virtual pair programmers, as I've noted before. I prefer faster models at lower reasoning ability to get quick turnaround to questions, but for the most part this feels not so much different from before. (I also think that fast inference is going to be a very attractive value proposition going forward that has not gotten enough focus.)

But those breaks are relatively short, and often I am even reviewing or otherwise digesting code when the agent comes back; i.e. the agent may be waiting for me rather than the other way around at times.

Obviously, sometimes you do have agents doing autonomous work, such as a thorough code review in the background. Again, this is not per se something new. Longer breaks, whether due to e.g. a really long fuzz test or CI run or waiting for a colleague to come back to you to answer a question you have is nothing new.

This is a perfect time to switch tasks, or go for your lunch break.

I'll note that I have yet to see a study that has amortized net productivity gains from agentic coding above 30%; nothing to sneeze at, but also not something you should drive yourself to burn out over. What we do seem to get is a lot more ability to iterate, which can go into feature refinement or improving code quality. What I think we need to be careful about is not to run up a lot of tech debt just because we can generate a lot of code faster. That is ultimately going to bite you. My preferred metric is not raw development velocity, but velocity that does not come at the cost of quality.

I'll add that things do tend to get exhausing even without continuous context switching. Agents eliminate a lot of the tedium of coding, but the tedium, while generally disliked, also was some downtime for our brains. If it becomes too much, I do switch to lower intensity tasks, of which there still tend to be quite a few.

I basically made a jira for my agents. It's super handy for context switching.

  > A lot of people are suggesting taking breaks, thinking before typing

I think so much of this is because everything is hype driven, from the core. To even get funding we have to promise hopes and dreams. While that started out reasonable it has escalated into selling promises that are obtuse at face value. Things that are more fantasy than Sci-Fi, or things that while they're even possible they're wildly impracticable simply due to the laws of physics (data centers in space?). Hell, people even propose things that would violate tons of international treaties AND have little to no practical value[0].

AI isn't the cause of any of this, but it is a catalyst. We need to have serious discussions about this now before the snake eats itself[1]. I don't know why we pretend that these things aren't foreseeable. Many of them are widely discussed long before they come to fruition. But I do also believe that this lust for speed forces blinders onto many. They don't have time nor energy to think creatively[2] or they fool themselves. AI increased speed, but that doesn't mean it increased velocity. That velocity still comes down to the engineers using this tool[3].

This new tool has forced us to come face to face with one of our oldest and greatest enemies: understanding. And I do mean old, Dijkstra wrote about it long ago[4].

We still can do great things in this age, but we're forced to take a step back and look at what has actually driven progress in the past. And if anyone claims to have a clear fool proof formula, well... that's just magic.

[0] Yes, giant mirrors in space are, in fact, space weapons. If you couldn't figure that out on your own you have some serious reflecting (pun intended) about your career choice as an engineer https://www.reflectorbital.com/

[1] At least fully. Google's latest earning reports already show that. And it isn't like years ago people called out Google's plan for AI search and how it would affect ad revenue. That discussion even started long before Gemini!

[2] Something that drives innovations and consequently, profits!

[3] It is still a tool. It is not magic. It never has been and it never will. Maybe you don't call it magic. Maybe you give it a "technical explanation" and conclude that it isn't. But actions speak louder than words and it isn't hard to see that people have treated code like magic since day one, it shouldn't be surprising that it's become more prolific with AI.

[4] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD02xx/EWD288...

This post is, sadly, AI slop. Fighting AI brain fry, inflicting it on everyone else

It's weird to me how many people treat an agent running as a signal to run another one in parallel, instead of just taking a break and doing something else you enjoy. If "code is compiling" was an excuse to get a break (https://xkcd.com/303/), why isn't "agent thinking"?

Reading books is critical.

I'd be very supportive of HN having a policy of no AI sloppy written articles.

This is clickbait slop.

i've been using git-bug for this and it helps a lot in complex projects

I do a similar thing using an open source tool (kata) that is a lightweight local issue tracker that also serves as a de facto roadmap planner and memory tool.

It's good but like most people I'll probably fall prey to the "have AI make a version tailor made to my flow" impulse sooner or later.

The more you think, the less your brain will feel fried. The more you write yourself, the more you will think.

Stop publishing stuff you didn't write, and you'll go a long way towards solving your problem, while also winning back readers who feel disrespected by AI slop writing.

> It is still exhausting. But I don't feel distracted or lost.

So not really solving the issue, just feeling productive for the hell of it. To me, this sounds like those X posts of some techbros LARPing with multiple screen setups where agents are running wild and generating summaries of stuff and are stacked over each other etc, all in the hope of optimizing something (no one knows what exactly).

Just have decent workflow across agents and you won't have to reinvent JIRA hell.

I don’t have this problem and it might be because I have skills and workflows that focus on decisions. When I open each session what I am looking at is mostly a series of decisions presented to me and if one of them doesn’t have sufficient context I ask for clarification but provide answers for all the ones that do. The agent can keep track of the overall goal and then produces either a document or a fix at the end.

So to me having 50 concurrent sessions is like playing 50 games of chess simultaneously: I can’t possibly remember my previous analysis or planning but that doesn’t matter because everything I need to know in order to make a decision is in front of me.

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