Flow sacredness made sense when we could only do our work serially and juggling tasks just meant switching around one thing at a time. Now we can parallelize more of our activities, so it's time to reevaluate the old wisdom.
Flow sacredness made sense when we could only do our work serially and juggling tasks just meant switching around one thing at a time. Now we can parallelize more of our activities, so it's time to reevaluate the old wisdom.
I disagree. Nothing has changed about how human brains work. Try to read something while listening to something else at the same time, and see how much you absorb, for example. We can still, in large part, only do our work serially.
You still work serially. It’s just while you’re reviewing output or working on the next prompt you have other agent sessions doing work. It’s entirely possible to be in a flow state cycling between concurrent agent sessions constantly reviewing output, building context and honing prompts.
The context switching may be difficult for some. Those that can manage it and excel at these new skills will undoubtedly become more productive than those who cannot and do not.
Companies are already starting to require the use of these tools and cycling workflows. It won't remain optional for long, just as it's no longer optional per dev preference to use pull requests, to minimize unblocked work-in-progress, to achieve test coverage standards, etc.
Expectations of full agentic parallelization is still not so widespread though as employers are slow to pick up on the need to budget $2400-4800+ annually per developer for enough capacity with recent sota tools.
I don’t think you understand. I’m not suggesting you try to do two tasks at the same time. The old wisdom isn’t that we shouldn’t do two things at once with our hands/minds directly. It’s that we shouldn’t put another task into WIP while an existing task is still pending completion, if theres work we can do on that already WIP task. (Lean methodology)
But now we can start the tasks and rest while they are ongoing, and wait until a later point to evaluate their result. So you have choices: do you avoid delegating any tasks because you think you can do them faster? Do you rest and do nothing or get distracted with non-work while you wait? Or do you begin parallel async work and interleave orchestration and evaluation tasks (performed serially as individual pieces)?
None of this is about breaking human psychology. It’s about how to adapt processes within lean methodologies that became pervasive in our industry.