alt Hacker News> The thing that’s really changed here is that the cost of context switching has dropped dramatically, because we’re operating a level higher than we used to.
I completely disagree with this.
I would argue that the cost of context switching has dramatically increased, since within the agentic pattern, an engineer is now forced to work at a higher pace across multiple topics; even if operating at a higher level, the amount of information required to be processed by a human brain is generally overwhelming.
I think it depends on how you approach vibe coding.
If you want to actually understand the code that goes into production or the engineering behind it, then yes, cost for context switching has increased massively.
If instead you just hand off engineering and understanding to the machine entirely, and reduce yourself to copy&pasting github issues into Claude Code and clicking the green button on its PRs, then there is pretty much no cost to context switching (because your brain is devoid of context).