I think that's slightly the wrong way to look at this multi agent stuff.

I have between 3 and 6 hours per day where I can sit in front of a laptop and work directly with the code. The more of the actual technical planning/coding/testing/bug fixing loop I can get done in that time the better. If I can send out multiple agents to implement a plan I wrote yesterday, while another agent fixes lint and type errors, a third agent or two or three are working with me on either brainstorming or new plans, that's great! I'll go out for a walk in the park and think deeply during the rest of the day.

When people hear about all of these agent - working on three plans at once, really? - it sounds overwhelming. But realistically there's a lot of downtime from both sides. I ask the agent a question, it spends 5-10 minutes exploring. During that time I check on another agent or read some code that has been generated, or do some research of my own. Then I'll switch back to that terminal when I'm ready and ask a follow up question, mark the plan as ready, or whatever.

The worst thing I did when I was first getting excited about how agents were good now, a whole two months ago, was set things up so I could run a terminal on my phone and start sessions there. That really did destroy my deep thinking time, and lasted for about 3 days before I deleted termux.

it can be cognitively demanding but you adapt and often get in a flow state… but it’s nothing like programming used to be though and I get that