Embracing the parallel coding agent lifestyle

I'm not convinced there is any hope for a productive, long-term, burnout-free parallel agent workflow.

Not while they need even the slightest amount of supervision/review.

My suspicion is that it's because the feedback loop is so fast. Imagine if you were tasked with supervising 2 co-workers who gave you 50-100 line diffs to review every minute. The uncanny valley is that the code is rarely good enough to accept blindly, but the response is quick enough that it feels like progress. And perhaps an human impulse to respond to the agent? And a 10-person team? In reality those 10 people would review each other's PRs and in a good organisation you trust each other to gatekeep what gets checked in. The answer sounds like managing-agents, but none of the models are good enough to reliably say what's slop and what's not.

I don't like to compare LLM's to people.

There is a real return of investment in co-workers over time, as they get better (most of the time).

Now, I don't mind engaging in a bit of Sisyphean endeavor using an LLM, but remember that the gods were kind enough to give him just one boulder, not 10 juggling balls.