So I limit myself to at most 2 or 3 things at once, and if all of those are in long running sessions, well so be it, I know I'll be deep back in it soon.
But it's tempting to start "just one more session", especially something like getting it to better profile and improve performance. That feels super productive, but is often just to stop me feeling "idle".
Currently what I task it to do is have one or multiple agent threads tied to a project work it and have this really token light skill laid out that leverages eleventy heavily and renders it as markdown file. Than paired with thisbit.ai (I made this and still am developing it) i just comment / voice over on all the bits from the article and have the agent take it from there again.
Also neither codex nor Claude code come even close to the lovely TUI renders of Gemini (Argon 4)
Mainly just for the overview of workstreams in flight and the ability to have a tree of tasks and subtasks (you can have a branching tree of agentic sessions) which are each their own session. These apps can remote into the tmux sessions too so it’s not even a change of workflow so much as presentation. Multimedia input/output is nice too.
Still not perfect but it’s pretty clear the dev environment of the future is going to be more and more focused on jobs management. What jobs do you have in flight? How do those jobs relate to each other? What needs your attention?
Sounds like a job for an agent...
Even pre-AI I would work in parallel while I waited for tests to finish, or deploy to go out or whatever.
But I still find myself coming back to a terminal window, the final summary of a long run (20-90min) on display, and asking the agent "where are we? what is next?"
And I still get the burnout feeling after dumping, reloading, dumping, reloading context for the 3 agents I have running simultaneously. That leads me to sometimes avoid the 4 or 5 open PRs, each with 20+ file changes I have to review, the stacked result of the last feature I asked the agent to start before I went out for a walk, or to eat lunch, or to sleep.
Starting loops is so easy now, so low friction. But closing things out, that last 20%, is still a slog. And I have a lot more of it now that agents can generate so much.
I wonder what the experience is of people here with the ultrafast mode (8x) of Codex.
I’ve seen so many teams having jira living one life that has nothing to do with real codebase.
I can usually have 3-4 tab groups running at one time. More than that I find to be counter productive
Come to think of it, it is indeed still 2005 outside
I still do LeetCode problems occasionally. It feels weird to write code and work through complex logic manually again, but I think it's more crucial than ever these days. It's like physical exercise. If you don't use your brain and keep challenging yourself, your problem-solving skills will eventually atrophy.
The AI age is trying to automate away our thinking, which runs the risk of making our brains look and feel like the same way as our bodies if we don't actively try to work them.
In the case of exercise, the majority of people don't pursue it in a somewhat post-labour era. I'm certain we'll see even less mental exercise in a post-thinking era. And it's deeply unsettling to think about how that will play out if we don't wake up and put a bit more mandatory/intentional thinking into the way we live with AI.
The only thing that will 100% atrophy when not coding is coding skill.
panic about “ai brain fry” is overblown
I think maybe we're conflating strictly cognitive facilities, facilities that can be maintained through all sorts of means, with intellectual skills and habits that really are in danger of atrophy when we rely too much on AI.
> A lot of people are suggesting taking breaks, thinking before typing
I think so much of this is because everything is hype driven, from the core. To even get funding we have to promise hopes and dreams. While that started out reasonable it has escalated into selling promises that are obtuse at face value. Things that are more fantasy than Sci-Fi, or things that while they're even possible they're wildly impracticable simply due to the laws of physics (data centers in space?). Hell, people even propose things that would violate tons of international treaties AND have little to no practical value[0].
AI isn't the cause of any of this, but it is a catalyst. We need to have serious discussions about this now before the snake eats itself[1]. I don't know why we pretend that these things aren't foreseeable. Many of them are widely discussed long before they come to fruition. But I do also believe that this lust for speed forces blinders onto many. They don't have time nor energy to think creatively[2] or they fool themselves. AI increased speed, but that doesn't mean it increased velocity. That velocity still comes down to the engineers using this tool[3].
This new tool has forced us to come face to face with one of our oldest and greatest enemies: understanding. And I do mean old, Dijkstra wrote about it long ago[4].
We still can do great things in this age, but we're forced to take a step back and look at what has actually driven progress in the past. And if anyone claims to have a clear fool proof formula, well... that's just magic.
[0] Yes, giant mirrors in space are, in fact, space weapons. If you couldn't figure that out on your own you have some serious reflecting (pun intended) about your career choice as an engineer https://www.reflectorbital.com/
[1] At least fully. Google's latest earning reports already show that. And it isn't like years ago people called out Google's plan for AI search and how it would affect ad revenue. That discussion even started long before Gemini!
[2] Something that drives innovations and consequently, profits!
[3] It is still a tool. It is not magic. It never has been and it never will. Maybe you don't call it magic. Maybe you give it a "technical explanation" and conclude that it isn't. But actions speak louder than words and it isn't hard to see that people have treated code like magic since day one, it shouldn't be surprising that it's become more prolific with AI.
[4] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD02xx/EWD288...
So not really solving the issue, just feeling productive for the hell of it. To me, this sounds like those X posts of some techbros LARPing with multiple screen setups where agents are running wild and generating summaries of stuff and are stacked over each other etc, all in the hope of optimizing something (no one knows what exactly).
Just have decent workflow across agents and you won't have to reinvent JIRA hell.