working with agents feels like managing a team of like 5-10 freakishly fast interns who have shockingly deep knowledge about a whole bunch of things like gpu programming or math, and who somehow still need basic guidance every hour or so to not make terrible decisions. it's pretty easy for me to spend an entire day just tabbing between my agents and redirecting them when they are doing something weird or getting stuck on something.

the more deeply i understand something and the more actively i interpose myself on decision making, the better outcomes are. if i task the agents with doing some very large thing that i have no idea how to do, i will get a horrific +100k line diff that breaks all the time in mysterious undebuggable ways, until at some point it all collapses in on itself and nothing ever works anymore and i need to throw the code away. if i design the code carefully and just use the agent to execute on a very specific vision of code i have in my head, the result is much more robust and successful, even though it actually doesn't even require that much of my time to design it and then answer a bunch of questions.

it feels really weird to be experiencing this brief interstitial time where it is basically completely pointless to do things by hand, and yet the rsi loop hasn't been closed yet, and so there is this job of agent herding that is absurdly productive but also very strangely shaped.