“I just kick a few agents off and get on with something else.”
…in the background.
Here you are. Getting on with something else.
waiting for you 2 things
focus, uninterrupted
- agents running
- 3
- lines awaiting your review
- 0
- context switches
- 0
- clear 25-minute stretches
- 0
They were extremely productive
- Opened eleven pull requests
- Touched 4,182 lines
- Wrote 96 tests, 94 of which pass
- Renamed one variable everywhere
- Added a README to a folder with one file in it
- Introduced a bug at 14:02 and fixed it at 14:40
- Deleted a comment that was load-bearing
Nine hours of work, in forty minutes. Extraordinary.
So were you
- Read 4,182 lines you did not write
- Understood about 900 of them
- Approved the rest
- Wrote a prompt explaining what you meant the first time
- Ran it again
- Ran it again
- Rolled one back
- Told someone you barely write code any more
Nine hours of work, in nine hours.
You didn’t get the time back. You got promoted to reviewer.
The agents are fast, tireless, and genuinely good at the part of the job that was already the easy part. Nobody sensible wants to go back to rebasing by hand at midnight.
But what comes out the other end is work that somebody has to read, and that somebody is you. Every agent you start is a small promise that you will look at what it did. Start six and you have made six promises. The queue is not a side effect of the speed. The queue is the speed, arriving somewhere you can’t parallelise.
So count the honest number. Not how many things are running — anyone can run things. How much of it is sitting there, finished, waiting for the one part of the pipeline that does not scale.
The serious version works this out properly. The other one is just a machine making a noise.