I don't know if I am just in an unlucky A/B assignment or anything but I really don't understand people juggling multiple agent sessions. For me Opus 4.6 High performance went from unbelievable to mediocre. And this keeps happening making the whole agentic coding very unreliable and frustrating. I do use it but I have to babysit and I get overwhelmed even with a single session.

> What’s become more fun is building the infrastructure that makes the agents effective.

Solving new problems is a thing engineers get to do constantly, whereas building an agent infrastructure is mostly a one-ish time thing. Yes, it evolves, but I worry that once the fun of building an agentic engineering system is done, we’re stuck doing arguably the most tedious job in the SDLC, reviewing code. It’s like if you were a principal researcher who stopped doing research and instead only peer reviewed other people’s papers.

The silver lining is if the feeling of faster progress through these AI tools gives enough satisfaction to replace the missing satisfaction of problem-solving. Different people will derive different levels of contentment from this. For me, it has not been an obvious upgrade in satisfaction. I’m definitely spending less time in flow.

> Fast rebuilds and automated previews made another friction visible: I could only comfortably work on one thing at a time.

Oh really? I enjoy doing one thing at the time, with focus.

AI, as you're using it OP, isn't make you faster, it is making you work more for the same amount of money. You burn yourself for no reason.

> The PR descriptions are more thorough than what I’d write, because it reads the full diff and summarises the changes properly. I’d gotten so used to the drudgery that I’d stopped noticing it was drudgery.

Who are you creating PR descriptions for, exactly? If you consider it "drudgery", how do you think your coworkers will feel having to read pages of generic "AI" text? If reviewing can be considered "drudgery" as well, can we also offload that to "AI"? In which case, why even bother with PRs at all? Why are you still participating in a ceremony that was useful for humans to share knowledge and improve the codebase, when machines don't need any of it?

> My role has changed. I used to derive joy from figuring out a complicated problem, spending hours crafting the perfect UI. [...] What’s become more fun is building the infrastructure that makes the agents effective. Being a manager of a team of ten versus being a solo dev.

Yeah, it's great that you enjoy being a "manager" now. Personally, that is not what I enjoy doing, nor why I joined this industry.

Quick question: do you think your manager role is safe from being automated away? If machines can write code and prose now better than you, couldn't they also manage other machines into producing useful output better than you? So which role is left for you, and would you enjoy doing it if "manager" is not available?

Purely rhetorical, of course, since I don't think the base premise is true, besides the fact that it's ignoring important factors in software development such as quality, reliability, maintainability, etc. This idea that the role of an IC has now shifted into management is amusing. It sounds like a coping mechanism for people to prove that they can still provide value while facing redundancy.

As an outsider it seems like agentic coders get buried in the weeds of running agents in parallel and churning out commits. (Even after a sheepish “commits are a bad metric but”) And every week there is a new orchestration, something, who even cares.

Is that the end game? Well why can’t the agents orchestrate the agents? Agents all the way down?

The whole agent coding scene seems like people selling their soul for very shiny inflatable balloons. Now you have twelve bespoke apps tailored for you that you don’t even care about.

> The PR descriptions are more thorough than what I’d write

Why do people do this? Why do they outsource something that is meant to have been written by a human, so that another human can actually understand what that first human wanted to do, so why do people outsource that to AI? It just doesn't make sense.

So many pretend they are more productive but so few are able to articulate what they actually produced.

Some says features. Well. Are they used. Are they beneficial in any way for our society or humanity? Or are we junk producing for the sake of producing?

I've been doing a lot of parallel work and it can be draining. It feels exciting to have 6 agents spinning on things, but unless you have very well scoped plans, you need to still check in frequently.

If you have the tokens for it, having a team of agents checking and improving on the work does help a lot and reduces the slop.