I'm the Bottleneck

I really enjoy programming with AI agents. This is the closest I’ve ever come to having magical superpowers. Today’s AI is already smart, capable, resourceful and agentic enough to bring me joy. This post is about the flip side of that: for most people I know, this fun turns into a death march. We have these powerful tools, but we feel more exhausted and overworked than ever. We ship more, but enjoy it less. Why is that? What can we do about it? Side Effects Context Switching. Context switching is bad for our brains (a lot of research papers back this up). But there seems to be no way to work with agents without context switching between several different threads. Ultrafast mode does help, but only a little, because the agents still need to compile, test, deploy and monitor their changes which takes time and forces us to switch to something else. Addictive Interactions. The interfaces we have today for interacting with agents are built like social apps: messages, unread indicators,…

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