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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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 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.
Yeah and also being okay with throwing away that other stuff if it doesn't work out.
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.