Discussion
Don't Wait for Claude
polyterative: Don't really agree, in my experience the switching context is extremely costly. I personally have trouble having even a couple of sessions running in parallel,Especially when I'm talking difficult hard to solve problems. Of course it's easy for trivial jobs, but it's not always the case. I have been much more successful in making my time worth by taking a look at the model's output and actively participating.It gives me time to think as well.When I have a list of simple tasks I just tell it to the model and it executes one after another.
lanyard-textile: I can do two or three at a time. I treat them a bit like queues: Last in first out, sort of like we do with our human peers.We delegate work, we tend to some other work, and we code review much later in the day.The secret to this mindset is that it doesn't always have to line up. Let your agent wait for you; You'll get to their output next.
tkzed49: was this written using a LinkedIn skill
phainopepla2: Just show us the prompt you used to produce this post instead of the output
EdNutting: “Don’t pay attention to what Claude is doing, just spam your way through code and commands and hope nothing went wrong and you catch any code issues in review afterwards” is what this sounds like.I will run parallel Claude sessions when I have a related cluster of bugs which can be fixed in parallel and all share similar context / mental state (yet are sufficiently distinct not to just do in one session with subagents).Beyond that, parallel sessions to maybe explore some stuff but only one which is writing code or running commands that need checking (for trust / safety / security reasons).Any waiting time is spent planning next steps (eg writing text files with prompts for future tasks) or reviewing what Claude previously did and writing up lists (usually long ones) of stuff to improve (sometimes with drafts prompts or notes of gotchas that Claude tripped up on the first time which I can prompt around in future).Spend time thinking, not just motoring your way through tokens.
switchbak: There's also a concern I don't hear folks talk about: the potential for all of this multi-tasking to be causing issues in your wellbeing or even harming your brain.Eg: "For example, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have shown that multitasking reduces activation in brain regions involved with cognitive control while increasing activation in areas associated with stress and arousal" - from https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11543232/I've tried hard to stay away from Instagram, TikTok, etc - for this very reason. Now my day job is going to be attacking me in much the same way? Great.
cruffle_duffle: This advice will be very dated when inference gets an order of magnitude faster. And it will happen—it’s classic tech. Probably will even follow moores law or something.Wait until that 8 minute inference is only a handful of seconds and that is when things get real wild and crazy. Because if the time inference takes isn’t a bottleneck… then iteration is cheap.
chis: Hackernews needs to nominate an elite crew of individuals who can tell when an article is AI slop and flag it.
the_af: Nice catch. Look at this at the end:> jc is open source. If you have improvements, have your Claude open a PR against mine. I don’t accept human-authored code.So it seems not only does the author reject human-authored PRs, they also refuse human-authored blog posts.
snovv_crash: I wonder if they also only want agents to read it, not people.
