Of my friends who use coding agents heavily, the happiest seem to fall into two distant camps:
a) Controlled fast loops: 1-2min cycles, mostly single-threaded, still totally in control of the code, using the agent "to type faster"
b) Delegated slow loops: Nudging along in the background a couple times a day, while something else (design, writing, etc) is their primary focus; paying ~no attention to code; it's fine if agents get stuck for hours
Like many, I've been trying to make some middle ground work: trying to delegate more than the first camp, while giving the work more focus and technical oversight than the second. My role is planning, technical guidance, and code review. This leads to 10-30min cycles, which lead to parallelism (to avoid busy-waiting), which leads to context-switching and fragmentation, which leads to working memory churn and poor comprehension, which leads to situations where neither the agents nor I understand what's going on.
It sucks and I hate it. I'm moving faster, but the work is unpleasant and unrewarding. It seems awfully hard to exert *partial* technical control—much easier to exert ~full or ~none.
The ideal, maybe, is something like what @simonlast outlines in https://t.co/M6R3EF5Yy7: teams of agents making technical plans, reviewing each others' work, autonomously and adversarially testing, etc. You still get robust "technical oversight"—just by other agents. Unfortunately in my domain (mobile interface with heavy gestures and animation) that's not yet tractable, even with lots of homegrown scaffolds and probes. But things will probably look very different in a year.
I'm curious if others have found happy middle ground between these poles?
“Disliking/Hating Tendency also acts as a conditioning device that makes the disliker/hater tend to (1) ignore virtues in the object of dislike, (2) dislike people, products, and actions merely associated with the object of his dislike, and (3) distort other facts to facilitate hatred.”
—Munger
It's Sunday June 12th, 2016 and the world is mourning the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting. Trump, who recently clinched the Republican Party nomination, posts on Twitter that Obama should leave office over the shooting.
You walk to a nearby cafe thinking about the possible implications of Move 37 (played a few months prior) and how neat the SpaceX reusable rockets are.
On the way, a mysterious gentleman pulls a newspaper out of his cloak and hands it to you. It's dated June 12th, 2026.
Top Headlines:
- Elon Musk Becomes World's First Trillionaire as SpaceX IPO's
- Department of War Publishes Third Release of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Files
- Citing Safety Concerns, Trump Administration Places Anthropic's New 10T Parameter AI Models Under Export Control
Huh? Still holding the newspaper, you look up... but the mysterious gentleman has already vanished. You look down... the headlines are also gone. Sipping your coffee, you think to yourself "Wow, these art students sure are are getting stranger and strfr!"
Before heading home, you find yourself checking the price of BTC... honestly, $600 per BTC seems pretty high. Maybe it's time to sell??
if i ran a restaurant in san francisco, i’d raise prices to psychotic levels.
$49 caesar salad.
$32 fries.
$24 sparkling water.
then i’d offer steep discounts based entirely on where you work.
teacher? discount.
nurse? discount.
city employee? discount.
barista? discount.
artist? discount.
openai, anthropic, meta, or google?
zero discount, full price.
surge pricing based on pure economics.
is this illegal?
“Programming, like writing, is an activity, where one iteratively sharpens what they're doing as they do it. (You wouldn't believe how many drafts I've written of this essay.)”
@TeamYouTube@BenSiemens1990 Can team help me? Lost all subscribers after transferring my Brand account. Now have 0 subscribers but still have all my videos (though they are set to private). https://t.co/FOjB9FSZjv