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by loveparade 2 days ago
Exactly. It matters that you enjoy working with your tools. Even if they don't make you 10x more productive, focusing on what you're working on and enjoying the process is the most important part.

Especially in the age of LLMs I think a lot of us hate the current tools that force you to context switch between N agents and terminals. Constant context switching takes the joy out of work and prevents you from getting into a flow state. I hope someone figures out the solution.
2 comments
lobofta 2 days ago
I don't think they force you to do that. Not trying to be pedantic, but you can also just wait for a single agent to finish its work.

Nowadays I often feel that that is a better spend of my time. Especially because it allows my mind to wonder about the next thing and what I could have missed. Before I was doing the context switching dance I felt I was going at 10x, but realized I was only perhaps going at 2x. Now I have severely reduced the number of threads, mostly to a single thread, and ask smaller questions. My sense is that I am probably now going at 2.5x but with my sanity restored and with a much firmer grasp of what is going on.

I also find myself coding more skeletons and letting an agent finish it, because I am again taking the time to think of the shape of the solution. The end result is better then when I allow the LLM to flail about in the codebase.

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nine_k 2 days ago
The agent is your tool then. I suppose you have put some effort into tuning it, by writing and honing various .md files, providing MCP servers and access tokens where access is needed, etc.
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embedding-shape 2 days ago
> Constant context switching takes the joy out of work and prevents you from getting into a flow state. I hope someone figures out the solution.

Don't do that if it bothers you? My best experience for "agent produces good code following good design" essentially been to always work with one agent, at most two, but in the same project. And while the agent works, I continue taking my notes of what I'm doing, what's next, what the design/architecture needs to evolve to do and so on.

Of course if you switch between five projects, you'll suffer the context switching cost. The best to avoid that? Don't context switch, find other related things to do close to the task you're "outsourcing", or start planning how to validate, or...

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loveparade 2 days ago
> And while the agent works, I continue taking my notes of what I'm doing, what's next, what the design/architecture needs to evolve to do and so on.

That is still context switching for me. I do the same. While the agent works, which may be 10 minutes, I start planning follow up tasks, etc. But then eventually I still need to come back to the original task to review the agents work.

I don't switch across projects usually. But I can never get into a flow state like that. But I also don't want to sit there for 10 minutes doing nothing

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nine_k 2 days ago
> sit there for 10 minutes doing nothing

Try that. Some of the best ideas get born during the "idle time".

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