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Comment by felipevb | Hacker News Reader

> The worktree system removed the friction of context-switching - juggling multiple streams of work without them colliding.

I'm so conflicted about this. On the one hand I love the buzz of feeling so productive and working on many different threads. On the other hand my brain gets so fried, and I think this is a big contributor.

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I would like some research regarding multi agent flows and impact on speed and correctness, because I have a feeling that it's like a texting and driving situation, where self perception of skill loss and measured skill loss diverge.

I have nothing to back up the idea though.

you do lose context, but if you generate a plan beforehand and save it, then it makes it easier to gain that context when you come back. I've been able to get out things a lot more quickly this way, because instead of "working" that day, I'll just review the work that's been queued up and focus on it one at a time, so I'm still the bottle neck but it has allowed me to move more quickly at times

Ooooh very interesting idea.

I also have nothing to back it up, but it fits my mental models. When juggling multiple things as humans, it eats up your context window (working memory). After a long day, your coherence degrades and your context window needs flushing (sleeping) and you need to start a new session (new day, or post-nap afternoon).

I am just running multiple agents to work on different projects. Once in a while I have a feature that splits nicely into multiple threads that can be developed concurrently, and I use several concurrent agents to do it. But that is rare.

Is constant juggling of multiple agents productive? I haven't seen the allure (except maybe with 2 agents sometimes). I guess it depends on what kind of tasks one is doing and I can imagine it working if doing large, long-running tasks, but then reviewing those large changes and refactoring becomes more difficult. And if you're juggling multiple agents, there's the mental context switching and tooling overhead for managing them. Maybe predictable and repetitive tasks can work well.

I prefer focusing mostly on 1 task at a time (sometimes 2 for a short time, or asking other agent some questions simultaneously) and doing the task in chunks so it doesn't take much time until you have something to review. Then I review it, maybe ask for some refactoring and let it continue to the next step (maybe let it continue a bit before finishing review if feeling confident about the code). It's easier to review smaller self-contained chunks and easier to refer to code and tell AI what needs changing because of fewer amount of relevant lines.

I have two modes. Mostly what you describe (phase 1), but followed by "project management" (phase 2), where I iterate through the impementing the plan done in phase 1.

the way I handle this is that I just create pull requests (tell the agent to do it at the end), and then I'll come back at a later time to review, so I always have stuff queued up to review.

I do parallel agents in worktrees and I don't always constantly keep an eye on them like a fry cook flipping 20 burgers at once. Sometimes it's just nice to know that I can spin one up, come back tomorrow, and some progress has been made without breaking my current flow.

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