The Programmers's Guide to Co-Designing with Agents

More mulch faster was never the goal. I've watched a lot of people put their foot on the gas over the last few months and steamroll out a mountain of code using the latest generation of model-assisted tools. I've done it myself. I wrote recently about the burnout that comes from indulging in extreme concurrency - running a swarm of agents, producing at a pace that outstrips your capacity for comprehension - and I think it's worth unpacking why that approach, while intoxicating, is probably a trap. It's something I've changed in myself over the last month or so to try stem the flow of blood and find, new, good, working patterns. The instinct to parallelise everything is the wrong instinct. I think it's a fool's errand to focus on concurrency as your primary workflow. You'll still end up with unfinished projects, but this time they'll be unfinished projects that you don't understand. This isn't really a new thought - we've long understood that focus time for software teams always wins. B