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Comment by polyterative | Hacker News Reader

Don't really agree, in my experience the switching context is extremely costly. I personally have trouble having even a couple of sessions running in parallel,Especially when I'm talking difficult hard to solve problems. Of course it's easy for trivial jobs, but it's not always the case. I have been much more successful in making my time worth by taking a look at the model's output and actively participating.It gives me time to think as well.When I have a list of simple tasks I just tell it to the model and it executes one after another.

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There's a lot more "telling" than "showing" going on.

By that I mean - the people claiming hyper-productivity from their GasTown setup never have actual products to demo.

Perhaps they earn $500k and worry spending any less than $250k in token may raise suspicion.

Something would be deeply wrong!

So far the only company that is really outspoken about the scale of their vibe coding has been Anthropic. However their uptime and bug count is atrocious.

They should vibecode their account management into the 21st century and let users change their email address without deleting their account.

There's also a concern I don't hear folks talk about: the potential for all of this multi-tasking to be causing issues in your wellbeing or even harming your brain.

Eg: "For example, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have shown that multitasking reduces activation in brain regions involved with cognitive control while increasing activation in areas associated with stress and arousal" - from https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11543232/

I've tried hard to stay away from Instagram, TikTok, etc - for this very reason. Now my day job is going to be attacking me in much the same way? Great.

I tried running multiple agents concurrently, but it is exhausting. My brain feels completely murdered and unhappy at the end of the day. I can do two, and keep both contexts active in my head, but not more than that. And even that feels stressful.

I agree that it is very exhausting

I can do two or three at a time. I treat them a bit like queues: Last in first out, sort of like we do with our human peers.

We delegate work, we tend to some other work, and we code review much later in the day.

The secret to this mindset is that it doesn't always have to line up. Let your agent wait for you; You'll get to their output next.

I don’t know about you but I’m not constantly round robin delegating work to peers and reviewing it on a 10-20 minute cadence. No one works like that. I don’t know if anyone is even capable of working like that day in and day out long term for any meaningful definition of review.

Who said a 10-20 minute cadence? :)

Sometimes yes, but often no. It takes time to write what you need into claude code and to review what it makes.

I do whatever work I need to do, however long it takes, send to claude, and immediately pop off the next queue item.

If it’s less than a 24 hours cadence it’s nothing like delegating work to colleagues.

Micromanaging 3 junior engineers working on different tasks to the point where you are reviewing each one’s work multiple times per day and assigning new tasks multiple times per day sounds like a quick ticket to burnout.

True. Sometimes I'll run front-end and backend work in two different claude instances, but always on the same project/product. I'll have "reviewer" instances in opencode using a different (non-Claude) model doing reviews, that's about as much as I can handle. You've got to supervise it while it works. I do have to stop claude from time to time when I catch it doing something naive or unnecessarily complex.

My tool supports doing many, but I find it hard to use it for much more than 3 or 4 concurrent projects. I've tried more than that open and I fail. I find that 3 project with 2 or 3 concurrent tasks at the same time works best for me. But I think I'm learning.

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