How I Fight AI Brain Fry

hsuduebc2

HN hug of death strikes again. I still do LeetCode problems occasionally. It feels weird to write code and work through complex logic manually again, but I think it's more crucial than ever these days. It's like physical exercise. If you don't use your brain and keep challenging yourself, your problem-solving skills will eventually atrophy.

firefoxd

Non-hugged link: https://web.archive.org/web/20261108193851/https://sergeykuh...

wallstop

The author's problem is that the are doing too many parallel agent things. It's very interesting that their solution space is "keep doing tons of parallel stuff, but with different tooling" instead of... "do less parallel stuff (and provide stronger attention)".

hexapus

I feel like sharing a blog post you let Claude write for you is a pretty good sign you have not successfully evaded AI Brain Fry.

stillpointlab

My setup is similar but it is still imperfect. Keeping track of what I am working on, and where I am in the process, as MD files in the same repo as the code has been a help. But I still find myself coming back to a terminal window, the final summary of a long run (20-90min) on display, and asking the agent "where are we? what is next?" And I still get the burnout feeling after dumping, reloading, dumping, reloading context for the 3 agents I have running simultaneously. That leads me to sometimes avoid the 4 or 5 open PRs, each with 20+ file changes I have to review, the stacked result of the last feature I asked the agent to start before I went out for a walk, or to eat lunch, or to sleep. Starting loops is so easy now, so low friction. But closing things out, that last 20%, is still a slog. And I have a lot more of it now that agents can generate so much.

yuppiepuppie

So instead of tabs, I do cmux’s named tab groups. From there I rank them in my sidebar by priority and makes sure I’m always staying on top of the top prio tab group. The others I’ll only navigate to when I’m free. I can usually have 3-4 tab groups running at one time. More than that I find to be counter productive

kvark

Why inventing your own issue/work tracking system based on git? Wouldn't it be easier to work with, say, github issues the same way? You create it normally, agent picks up, works, updates the status on it or in the relevant wip PR, then potentially adding "needs more info" label. You'd get all the same tracking benefits and more: better UI, kanban, more tools.

caaqil

> It is still exhausting. But I don't feel distracted or lost. So not really solving the issue, just feeling productive for the hell of it. To me, this sounds like those X posts of some techbros LARPing with multiple screen setups where agents are running wild and generating summaries of stuff and are stacked over each other etc, all in the hope of optimizing something (no one knows what exactly). Just have decent workflow across agents and you won't have to reinvent JIRA hell.

tra3

With agentic development, we're saying every software developer is now managing a team (of agents). We already kinda know how to do that. Issue trackers, stand ups, design documents. I'm using GitHub issues to manage the queue and it works ok. I don't need to know all of the context for every task, so maybe an aggregated "stand up" would be better.

gb2d_hn

It's interesting watching everyone build their solutions to this new world of problems. Mine has been to double down on my markdown notes, extending https://app.etherpk.com so that every task (plain markdown) can be viewed under it's wikilink (or several) on a kanban board. An MCP server knows how to interact with the notes graph. I copy a reference to the task, hand it to an agent, and the agent works with blocks under the task from there. It basically means I can give the agent really rich context up front - images, excalidraw drawings etc and the agent can update the task as it goes. Having everything on a kanban board makes it easier to step away from a task to work on whichever really needs my attention and come back. Putting this together with herdr has been very productive. I still have to watch the brain fry, but it is helping. Don't know if I'm selling the idea but I feel like I'm on to something after experimenting with various systems similar to what the author is suggesting. I'm working on making a product of it. The onboarding needs some streamlining but it's available to use for free for local graphs.

hetspookjee

I’ve tried this kind of format too but it didn’t stick for me as i was missing the rich context the sessions were able to provide for me. Specifically the lack of diagrams and other nice formatting that is possible in HTML files. I also tried linear as a broker in between for a while but it just blew up and became too tedious to navigate and ran out of sync fast. Also expensive on token overhead. Currently what I task it to do is have one or multiple agent threads tied to a project work it and have this really token light skill laid out that leverages eleventy heavily and renders it as markdown file. Than paired with thisbit.ai (I made this and still am developing it) i just comment / voice over on all the bits from the article and have the agent take it from there again. Also neither codex nor Claude code come even close to the lovely TUI renders of Gemini (Argon 4)

wseqyrku

I like how that resembles the unix philosophy, do five things and do nothing well

docheinestages

Why start several threads in parallel to begin with? If waiting is an issue, maybe you should break that one task into multiple steps. That would only produce more output at a lower quality. Nothing has changed about the human thinking capacity. Focus on one thing and get it done.

mdemare

This is a temporary problem. A 10x-100x speedup will allow us to simply wait for the response, instead of finding something else to do in the meantime. I wonder what the experience is of people here with the ultrafast mode (8x) of Codex.

AnotherGoodName

I’ve moved on from tmux to the apps that come with the agents at this point. Mainly just for the overview of workstreams in flight and the ability to have a tree of tasks and subtasks (you can have a branching tree of agentic sessions) which are each their own session. These apps can remote into the tmux sessions too so it’s not even a change of workflow so much as presentation. Multimedia input/output is nice too. Still not perfect but it’s pretty clear the dev environment of the future is going to be more and more focused on jobs management. What jobs do you have in flight? How do those jobs relate to each other? What needs your attention?

yigitcan07

Claude Desktop should build this as an interface. It recently gained a lot of useful features that makes managing sessions and working on multiple things very easy. Only thing missing is the inbox now. A central place for summary of everything you are actively working on and what agents need from you.

godelski

> A lot of people are suggesting taking breaks, thinking before typing While I think these are actually some of the best suggestions they really do require a massive overhaul of our work culture. The technology field has put speed ahead of all else, including profits. We've frequently shown that we're penny wise but pound foolish. The industry is overrun with FOMO. I think so much of this is because everything is hype driven, from the core. To even get funding we have to promise hopes and dreams. While that started out reasonable it has escalated into selling promises that are obtuse at face value. Things that are more fantasy than Sci-Fi, or things that while they're even possible they're wildly impracticable simply due to the laws of physics (data centers in space?). Hell, people even propose things that would violate tons of international treaties AND have little to no practical value[0]. AI isn't the cause of any of this, but it is a catalyst. We need to have serious discussions about this now before the snake eats itself[1]. I don't know why we pretend that these things aren't foreseeable. Many of them are widely discussed long before they come to fruition. But I do also believe that this lust for speed forces blinders onto many. They don't have time nor energy to think creatively[2] or they fool themselves. AI increased speed, but that doesn't mean it increased velocity. That velocity still comes down to the engineers using this tool[3]. This new tool has forced us to come face to face with one of our oldest and greatest enemies: understanding. And I do mean old, Dijkstra wrote about it long ago[4]. We still can do great things in this age, but we're forced to take a step back and look at what has actually driven progress in the past. And if anyone claims to have a clear fool proof formula, well... that's just magic. [0] Yes, giant mirrors in space are, in fact, space weapons. If you couldn't figure that out on your own you have some serious reflecting (pun intended) about your career choice as an engineer https://www.reflectorbital.com/ [1] At least fully. Google's latest earning reports already show that. And it isn't like years ago people called out Google's plan for AI search and how it would affect ad revenue. That discussion even started long before Gemini! [2] Something that drives innovations and consequently, profits! [3] It is still a tool. It is not magic. It never has been and it never will. Maybe you don't call it magic. Maybe you give it a "technical explanation" and conclude that it isn't. But actions speak louder than words and it isn't hard to see that people have treated code like magic since day one, it shouldn't be surprising that it's become more prolific with AI. [4] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD02xx/EWD288...

jpadkins

I also have this problem, started on a similar solution. Mine is a visual board with cards and discussion threads. Cards have context at an abstraction level I deal with (I don't review code) and agents ask me questions below it. Tooling is very early, very rough but I am feeling more productive than juggling 2-5 sessions.

_superposition_

I've been using herdr without much trouble. Very easy to use. You'll have to pry my terminal from my cold, dead hands.

eterm

I've learned that rather than juggle too much, I just accept that I'm still more productive than ever before, even if I'm "idle", it's important to take time to have a break and to recharge, refresh and reflect. So I limit myself to at most 2 or 3 things at once, and if all of those are in long running sessions, well so be it, I know I'll be deep back in it soon. But it's tempting to start "just one more session", especially something like getting it to better profile and improve performance. That feels super productive, but is often just to stop me feeling "idle".