alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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You still won't be able to internalize the updated state across all of these changes because you are not doing the changes yourself. I can still recall most of the code I wrote in the first 20 years of my career, if not in super great detail then at least in enough detail to know where I should start if I want to do something with that code. With AI generated code it feels much the same as if someone else wrote it, I have absolutely no idea about code written like that last week even if I did review it simply because it was too much to keep in mind beyond the most superficial top level.
I main Deepseek Flash and the biggest bottleneck often isn't the model itself, its external stuff like compilation, testing things, making requests, running linters
The bottleneck is not only the model latency, Although it would help.
When you compile an ios app, or wait for some query result, search slack or wait for Github CI to finish, it all introduces significant wait between agent turns.
Models getting faster would help but would not eliminate the problem.
If call centres are anything to go by, it will be penalized to work on a single thing at once. The longer your workplace can resist measurements related to agents, the more sane the workplace will remain IMO, otherwise, it will turn into what happened to call centres around the 2000s. Measure everything down to the second, and introduce expectations that you will need to spend time justifying if you miss them.