> The single biggest potential productivity gain though I think is being able to do something else while the agent is coding, like you can go review a PR and then when you come back check out what the agent produced.
I've already passed through this phase and have given up on it. I'm sure everyone's experience will vary, but I just find it introduces either sufficiently more context switching or detracts sufficiently enough mental engagement that I end up introducing more errors, feeling miserable, or just straight up losing productivity and focus. This type of workflow is only viable for me if the cost of mistakes is low, the surface area for changes is small, or the mental context is the same between activities.
The expectation that this is a serviceable workflow—I fear, and am experiencing—will ultimately just create more compressed timelines for everything, while quality, design, and job satisfaction will drop. Yes the code can be written while I look at a PR, but if it's a non-trivial amount of code or a non-trivial PR (which tends to become more frequent as more code generation and larger refactors are happening) then I'm just context switching between tasks I need to constantly re-zone in on, which is less gratifying and more volatile in a way that just hurts my mind and soul and money doesn't change in a meaningful way.
That's not to say I'm not using them or seeing no productivity gains, but I'm not reclaiming that much time due to being able to anything concurrently, it's mostly reclaiming time I'd otherwise have procrastinated on something.
For years I worked at a large company with so many blockers for everything that I always worked like this all the time - have 5 projects so when one becomes blocked for external deps, you have one to pull out and work on. There is a context switch (which lead me to context preservation habits like checking everything I write into git; using tmux so that the context is sitting around in the bash history of the shell where I was working, that sort of thing; lots of org files and Mac stickies with TODOs etc).
I've tried the "4 agents running at the same time in different projects/features" and I felt literally dizzy. I still do the "check something else while the agent runs", and I often forget about that terminal window for many minutes, only to remember about it several tasks later.