By that I mean - the people claiming hyper-productivity from their GasTown setup never have actual products to demo.
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.
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 will run parallel Claude sessions when I have a related cluster of bugs which can be fixed in parallel and all share similar context / mental state (yet are sufficiently distinct not to just do in one session with subagents).
Beyond that, parallel sessions to maybe explore some stuff but only one which is writing code or running commands that need checking (for trust / safety / security reasons).
Any waiting time is spent planning next steps (eg writing text files with prompts for future tasks) or reviewing what Claude previously did and writing up lists (usually long ones) of stuff to improve (sometimes with drafts prompts or notes of gotchas that Claude tripped up on the first time which I can prompt around in future).
Spend time thinking, not just motoring your way through tokens.
One of them was vibe-coding an Electron app for myself that was running a Llama server. Claude couldn't find out why it wasn't running on Windows while it worked fine on Linux and Mac. I obviously didn't check all its output but after several hours had a feeling that it was running in circles. Eventually we managed to cooperatively debug it after I gave it several hints but it wasted a a lot of time for a rather simple issue which was a challenge for me also because I didn't know well how the vibe-coded app worked.
The second one (can't go into details) was also something that's reasonably simple but I was finding awfully many bugs because unlike the first app, this one was for my job and I review everything. So we had to go back and forth for multiple hours.
How can someone just switch to another task while the current one requires constant handholding?
If you start trying to juggle multiple agents, you are doubling down on the wrong strategy.
Whenever I see transcript of a long running task, I see a lot of drifting of the agent due to not having any context (or the codebase is not organized) and it trying various way to gather information. Then it settle on the wrong info and produce bad results.
Greppability of the codebase helps. So do following patterns and good naming. A quick overview of the codebase and convention description also shortens the reflection steps. Adding helper tools (scripts) help too.
> jc is open source. If you have improvements, have your Claude open a PR against mine. I don’t accept human-authored code.
So it seems not only does the author reject human-authored PRs, they also refuse human-authored blog posts.
And for those who are feeling smug, that last one (which I still consider fairly recent) was 14 years ago
> me: I want our agent to know how to invoke skills.
> Claude: [...]
> Claude: Done. That's the whole change. No MCP config, no new env vars, no caller changes needed.
> me: ok, test it.
> Claude: This is a big undertaking.
That's the hard part, right? Maybe Claude will come back with questions, or you'll have to kick it a few times. But eventually, it'll declare "I fixed the bug!" or summarize that the feature is implemented. Then what?
I get a ton of leverage figuring this out what I need to see to trust the code. I work on that. Figure out if there's a script you can write that'll exercise everything and give you feedback (2nd claude session!). Set up your dev env so playwright will Just Work and you can ask Claude to click around and give you screenshots of it all working. Grep a bunch and make yourself a list of stuff to review, to make sure it didn't miss anything.
I wonder what people think about this. I know there is a class of SWE/dev who now consider oneself as "the manager of agents". Good luck to them and articles like this would work for these people.
I'm not there yet and I hope I don't have to. I'm not a LLM and my mental model is (I believe) more than a markdown. But I haven't figured out the mental model that works for me, still staring at the terminal Claude blinking the cursor, sticking to "don't multitask" dogma.
Disagree. The fix is actually counter-intuitive: give Claude smaller tasks so that it completes them in less time and you remain in the driver's seat.
Is this sarcasm? If not, I wonder why.
Of course there is a relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/303/
Wait until that 8 minute inference is only a handful of seconds and that is when things get real wild and crazy. Because if the time inference takes isn’t a bottleneck… then iteration is cheap.