[locknitpicker]

> congratulations on your soon to be coming burnout.

Multitasking does not mean burnout. It just means you are not wasting time while idling. Multitasking was not invented for AI coding assistants. What do you think feature branches are used for?

[well_ackshually]

The constant context changes, mental overload, inability to focus on one thing and do it well is exactly what every software developer has been fighting against for the past thirty years because it leads to shit quality and burns you out. You're automating the burnout. Idling is a necessity, not an illness.

Your feature branch is to put things aside and send them to CI, or wait and think on them. Not to have four of them running in parallel in your head frying you.

[locknitpicker]

> The constant context changes, (...)

After you put together a plan, today's models can take well over a minute to execute it. Also, your work shifts to code review and executing acceptance tests, followed by either tweaking your current change or moving on to the next change.

This is really not about context changes. This is about not having to switch contexts because your focus stays on architecture+review instead of having to do deep dives to type code around.

> Your feature branch is to put things aside and send them to CI, or wait and think on them.

No, not really. Feature branches, as well as most types of branches, is to set aside work fronts that are in progress and run in parallel.

[well_ackshually]

>today's models can take well over a minute to execute it.

A full, whole, entire _minute_ ?! Sixty seconds ! Oh no, they must be optimized away, we do not deserve our free time like so, we should toil until we fall over because... Growth?

It's still context switching. Either what you're doing is surface enough that you don't give a shit, it doesn't matter and you don't review it anyways (so the only context is basically the prompt you wrote or the nth SELECT * FROM table CRUD piece of crap), or you're context switching and it's fucking you over. The context isn't about remembering how you write if err != nil, it's the expected behaviour of what you're working on.

You're not getting a promotion from doing this, you're getting burnout.

> Feature branches, as well as most types of branches, is to set aside work fronts that are in progress and run in parallel

They're not running in parallel, unless you use work trees. They were put to the side, because you can't continue or finish the work they're about. Even just three branches in parallel in a modestly active repo that happen to be long lived drift enough that just keeping them up to date with develop makes it a waste of time.

Focus on one or two things, and do them well.

That, or get checked for ADHD.

[danielbln]

Don't be so dismissive. Every person is different, and you struggling with multitasking doesn't mean everyone is.

[gabble]

From [1]

The scientific study of multitasking over the past few decades has revealed important principles about the operations, and processing limitations, of our minds and brains. One critical finding to emerge is that we inflate our perceived ability to multitask: there is little correlation with our actual ability. In fact, multitasking is almost always a misnomer, as the human mind and brain lack the architecture to perform two or more tasks simultaneously. By architecture, we mean the cognitive and neural building blocks and systems that give rise to mental functioning. We have a hard time multitasking because of the ways that our building blocks of attention and executive control inherently work. To this end, when we attempt to multitask, we are usually switching between one task and another. The human brain has evolved to single task.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7075496/

[danielbln]

Fair enough, so it's a misnomer. Let's call it task switching then, since we don't actually do tasks at the same time, but switch from one to the other. A Claude Code session helpfully prints a small tldr summary of the ongoing session, so that one can quickly onboard again to the task at hand. I do not find that draining, personally.

[locknitpicker]

> A full, whole, entire _minute_ ?!

If you honestly had any concern about loosing focus and being forced to context switch, a 1 minute pause idling while waiting for something to happen would represent the root cause of your context switch problems.

[exe34]

> What do you think feature branches are used for?

Yak driven development.