[steve_adams_86]

I’ve been finding I can mitigate the sense of being overwhelmed by trying to keep my tasks within the same domain or part of the code base. I know it’s not always an option, though.

I guess the goal is to stack context rather than spread it.

I find it incredibly exhausting otherwise. It’s a skill I don’t have in spades. I’ll have to develop it, though.

I don’t think the people trusting agents end to end are getting the quality they think they are. I’m bullish on AI as a permanent and genuinely useful tool in our kit, but I’m not seeing signs that you can actually let them loose at all. Looping on a very well defined problem, sure. But open-ended tasks across large infrastructures and complex domains, no, it’s going to be duct tape and sprawl as far as the IDE can see. It’s going to sprawl faster than context limits can grow, and the mess will only get worse.

From what I can tell, the solution is an ever-expanding roster of agents to make piece work of these immense tasks. The token expense for this approach is insane, though. I used deep-research in Claude Code today and it dispatched 103 agents and consumed something like 3.5MM tokens in ten minutes. That can’t be the future, can it?