I feel this is not discussed enough. I can attest to this 100%.
Just the past weekend, I was talking with a very senior engineer (~distinguished engineer at a very large tech co) who basically said he's working 8-8-6 (8 am - 8 pm, 6 days/week), "writing code" (more like supervising 8-15 agents) for a product demo in 2 weeks, which otherwise would have taken at least 1 quarter's worth of time with a small team. He's zonked out, fwiw. There are no junior engineers in the team ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, most having been laid off a few months ago.
The toll it takes, and the expectations of AI-driven productivity, have only increased dramatically. At some point, the reality will hit the remaining engg team. Not sure if the company or its leadership realizes, but so far, it's all-AI, all-the-time, human cost of productivity be damned.
If if this person really is a distinguished engineer, then they are part of leadership and it's their responsibility to set realistic expectations. Leadership knows this, they just don't care and won't care until the job market improves.
I often have 10+ running in parallel. I’m attacking parallel problems that aren’t interdependent. Sometimes adding additional products can bring me up to 15+.
Gotta have really good test harnesses so they can largely fix themselves.
We have our doubts about this. Can you share your code or product?
Anecdotally, my mistakes and lack of understanding exponentiate the more I try to parallelize.
As I said in the neighboring comment, for vibe coding side projects and prototypes for work I just merge and iterate. It works out more than it doesn’t. For anything bigger at work I cannot share as I’m at Apple.
But you have to keep it in your head, and remember all stuff at the same time. How is it possible to track, and do reviews one after another? Or are these pretty long running agents?
I’m not sure what you mean by keep it in your head? I know all of the parts the agents are working on. It’ll often be a mix between bigger tasks (some large refactor, new feature, etc) and small tasks (little bug fixes).
For prototyping I just merge. I don’t bother to review the code. For anything more important than I am reviewing the code and going back and forth. Basically there’s a queue of stuff demanding my attention, and I just serially go through them.
What’s also been really helpful to me is /simplify and similar code review skills (I have my own). That alone takes an agent a while to parse through everything it’s done and self reviews. It catches quite a lot itself this way.
>I’m not sure what you mean by keep it in your head?
If the project I work on is large enough, it takes me some time to get everything I need to understand for review into the short term memory. If it's small enough, it's less of a problem for me.
Honestly, I dont know. I could be mistaken about the exact number of agents - but not wrong about fact of AI-driven workflows which is heavily automated, and goes on for hours.
He's one (small) step from distinguished engineer, with 20+ patents to his name, and is an embedded programmer (largely C/C++) with 30+ years of experience in the field; and I've known him for nearly as long, so I put a lot of credence to his words.
But we don't usually talk work; he's the guitarist in our band :) [I'm the bass] So we mainly chill over music + beer.
And lately, it's been less chill ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Just the past weekend, I was talking with a very senior engineer (~distinguished engineer at a very large tech co) who basically said he's working 8-8-6 (8 am - 8 pm, 6 days/week), "writing code" (more like supervising 8-15 agents) for a product demo in 2 weeks, which otherwise would have taken at least 1 quarter's worth of time with a small team. He's zonked out, fwiw. There are no junior engineers in the team ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, most having been laid off a few months ago.
The toll it takes, and the expectations of AI-driven productivity, have only increased dramatically. At some point, the reality will hit the remaining engg team. Not sure if the company or its leadership realizes, but so far, it's all-AI, all-the-time, human cost of productivity be damned.