I believe we clutter our workspaces because we suck at keeping iterations short. We always want to add one more feature, tweak one more thing, etc.

Eventually, some external pressure (boss, client, IM, whatever) causes us to open a second context simultaneously. Then it happens with a third, a fourth, etc

This is happening because the world is expecting shorter and shorter time to results due to better tooling in the last 10 years, but most have not figured out that all the LLMs and agents in the world won’t shorten the loop, only the person using them can do that.

I find that for any given problem, if I don’t see results in 30 minutes, it’s time to stop that problem and likely reshape it. If I don’t actually get the result in 90-120 minutes, I’m doing something wrong.