@simonw

Tip: Figure out your personal ceiling for running multiple agents in parallel.

We need to accept that more agents running doesn't mean more of _you_ available. The narrative is still mostly about throughput and parallelism, but almost nobody's talking about what it actually… https://t.co/Mud6QMj7fp

— Addy Osmani (@addyosmani) 3 avril 2026

Tip: Figure out your personal ceiling for running multiple agents in parallel. We need to accept that more agents running doesn't mean more of _you_ available. The narrative is still mostly about throughput and parallelism, but almost nobody's talking about what it actually costs the human in the loop. You're holding multiple problem contexts in your head at once, making judgment calls continuously, and absorbing the anxiety of not knowing what any one agent might be quietly getting wrong. That's a new kind of cognitive labor we don't have good language for yet. I've started treating long agentic sessions the way I'd treat deep focus work: time-boxed and tighter scopes per agent dramatically change how much mental overhead each thread carries. Finding your personal ceiling with these tools is itself a skill and most of us are going to learn it the hard way before we learn it intentionally. Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) "Using coding agents well is taking every inch of my 25 years of experience as a software engineer, and it is mentally exhausting. I can fire up four agents in parallel and have them work on four different problems, and by 11am I am wiped out for the day. There is a limit on human cognition. Even if you're not reviewing everything they're doing, how much you can hold in your head at one time. There's a sort of personal skill that we have to learn, which is finding our new limits. What is a responsible way for us to not burn out, and for us to use the time that we have?" @simonw — https://nitter.net/lennysan/status/2039845666680176703#m

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