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Comment by englishspot | Hacker News Reader

I work on backend infra. I touch a lot of things and have multiple instances of claude code running at once. I do feel like I'm doing more simultaneously. but that's still more that I have to keep track of and make sense of in my head. claude is making me way more productive, for sure, but at the same time I feel way more overwhelmed than I've ever been.

idk how anyone else is doing it and managing all of this. supposedly there's people with large teams of agents that they can just trust to do everything end-to-end.

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I’ve been finding I can mitigate the sense of being overwhelmed by trying to keep my tasks within the same domain or part of the code base. I know it’s not always an option, though.

I guess the goal is to stack context rather than spread it.

I find it incredibly exhausting otherwise. It’s a skill I don’t have in spades. I’ll have to develop it, though.

I don’t think the people trusting agents end to end are getting the quality they think they are. I’m bullish on AI as a permanent and genuinely useful tool in our kit, but I’m not seeing signs that you can actually let them loose at all. Looping on a very well defined problem, sure. But open-ended tasks across large infrastructures and complex domains, no, it’s going to be duct tape and sprawl as far as the IDE can see. It’s going to sprawl faster than context limits can grow, and the mess will only get worse.

From what I can tell, the solution is an ever-expanding roster of agents to make piece work of these immense tasks. The token expense for this approach is insane, though. I used deep-research in Claude Code today and it dispatched 103 agents and consumed something like 3.5MM tokens in ten minutes. That can’t be the future, can it?

Right there with you - this has been my experience as well, to a tee

I can do more now…so I do - it’s really that simple

And it’s way more exhausting because there’s no room to breathe - fresh code to work with every few minutes with prepping for the next set of tasks in between

On the one hand the dopamine’s got me hooked on this like a video game

On the other…I’m as overwhelmed as ever line you said, even if it’s my own doing

It is definitely a different type of stress. I used to lock in on one problem in deep work. Now it’s a constant juggling of 7 problems. It feels good to close one out, but your other 6 keep you perpetually locked in the stress loop.

idk if anyone here is a gamer, but it feels like I'm playing Dynasty Warriors. endless wave after wave after wave of things to do, notifications about fires to put out all over the map, all at once.

and that's just on my terminal.

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