alt Hacker NewsI've learned that rather than juggle too much, I just accept that I'm still more productive than ever before, even if I'm "idle", it's important to take time to have a break and to recharge, refresh and reflect.
So I limit myself to at most 2 or 3 things at once, and if all of those are in long running sessions, well so be it, I know I'll be deep back in it soon.
But it's tempting to start "just one more session", especially something like getting it to better profile and improve performance. That feels super productive, but is often just to stop me feeling "idle".
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Agreed -- I only do 2 active things at a time, and maybe something third that is long-running in the background (like training a model or classifying thousands of files, where I just need to check in occasionally to make sure it hasn't veered off-track).
It's rare that with my 2 active things, they're both busy, since one usually finishes while I'm drafting my reply to the other.
When it occasionally happens that both are busy for the next 5 min, I just get to enjoy the break and stretch my legs and walk to the kitchen or something.
My cycle with agents has become: spend several days doing detailed planning architecture documents. Codify all new plans into Jira cards as isolated features. Mass fanout on the cards whenever possible with up to 32 agents running at a time, basically becomes a question frenzy for a couple crunch days. Stop and do testing and reviews for a week or two, I can generate up to 20 PRs per crunch day fairly reliably. Rinse and repeat. I feel lucky the type of software I'm producing is amenable to this process, some types aren't.
I also try to use my idle time reading research papers, to make up for AI making me dumber in other respects.
I like this approach. I do exactly the same: do less with more focus. I do feel more productive. Otherwise there are too many sessions open and I get distracted and lost.
I keep a couple sessions running on one monitor, and DOOM in the other. When I need a break from one, I move to the other. It’s a very enjoyable cadence.
Yeah and also being okay with throwing away that other stuff if it doesn't work out.
Jesus.
I only ever run one. You need to just write thoughts on a piece of paper while the agent runs. Do some design work or something.
The thing is, you’re not going to remember any of it so you’ll be useless to companies, and they can just hire someone else to have their own AI figure out what work your spaghetti agents did.
Slow down, for your own good!
I feel you
I think the multitasking problem will become a thing of the past when (or “if”) the models get much faster. I would absolutely love to just work on one thing at a time with a super fast model.
In the earlier days when they were slower and their code was worse so you had to review it, I’d watch the model code and just noodle away on guitar while it did its thing, interrupting it from time to time. Now they’re too fast for that to work, but still too slow for it not to be worth it to start a new task. It’s an awkward in-between stage.
If Anthropic made fast mode four or five times faster rather than just twice as fast, I’d probably shell out for it sometimes just to be able to single-task productively.