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.
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.
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.
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.
“Don’t pay attention to what Claude is doing, just spam your way through code and commands and hope nothing went wrong and you catch any code issues in review afterwards” is what this sounds like.
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.
I don't know how and if people really manage to run many tasks in parallel and also not check the output. Very recently I had two items that for a reasonably intelligent engineer wouldn't be very complex, but would take time to implement.
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?
I'd offer a different approach: think about how you're going to validate. An only-slightly-paraphrased Claude conversation I had yesterday:
> 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.
For every single post of this type: please stop writing as if you know that any of this works well.
You don’t know! You are experimenting, speculating, and excited to share. That’s fine.
What’s not okay is presenting a false impression that you have deep experience and did sufficient experimentation and that you know the risks and have experienced the problems associated with your wonderful idea. This takes time.
I want to know:
- Caveats
- Variations
- Descriptions of things that went wrong
- Self-critical reflection
- Awareness of objections that others will probably have
- Comparison with viable alternatives
If you want to credibly say “Don’t do this! Do that!” there is a high bar to meet.
The old saying is "don't multitask" but apparently that time is gone.
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.
Or, wait and take a little break so you don't burn out. I miss the days where you had to wait for code to compile or for your "big data" job to run, so you could give yourself a little mini break.
This advice will be very dated when inference gets an order of magnitude faster. And it will happen—it’s classic tech. Probably will even follow moores law or something.
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.
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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.
If you start trying to juggle multiple agents, you are doubling down on the wrong strategy.
https://hbr.org/2010/12/you-cant-multi-task-so-stop-tr
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?
> The fix is obvious: work on something else while Claude runs.
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.
> 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.
You don’t know! You are experimenting, speculating, and excited to share. That’s fine.
What’s not okay is presenting a false impression that you have deep experience and did sufficient experimentation and that you know the risks and have experienced the problems associated with your wonderful idea. This takes time.
I want to know:
- Caveats - Variations - Descriptions of things that went wrong - Self-critical reflection - Awareness of objections that others will probably have - Comparison with viable alternatives
If you want to credibly say “Don’t do this! Do that!” there is a high bar to meet.
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.
> jc is open source. If you have improvements, have your Claude open a PR against mine. I don’t accept human-authored code.
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.