It's funny, because LLMs have context switching costs too! Cached tokens cost less than non-cached. There's no reason to think that doesn't apply to humans.
replyI’ve genuinely found that context switching is a skill like any other. When I first started using LLMs and context switching doing 5-10 different work streams at once I was utterly, utterly exhausted at the end of each day.
replyNow many months in, it doesn’t feel nearly as taxing.
Maybe this is in no small part due to LLMs improving enough you don’t have to spend as much mental energy reviewing their output and them being better at managing worktrees and other tedium, but the idea of doing lots of things at once feels like a mental muscle that was previously weak and has gained in strength in ways I never though possible for me.
5-10 feels like a lot. I can reliably maintain hands on 2-4 separate work streams. I still need to maintain a pretty close eye on changes to our system, as I’m one of 2 devs. I’ve tried doing 5+ things at once and I just cannot get it to work. I think I move faster when I’m more involved anyhow, since I have adequate “mini-context” of what each operation is.
replyOur org has a really nicely set up review bot which has access to a repo of really strict standards to check new code against. It means that the reviews are much more useful and catch a lot of things that a plain bot wouldn’t. I think that’s a huge factor in being able to trust the reviews to catch more. You can also check the repo out locally.
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