In the earlier days when they were slower and their code was worse so you had to review it, I’d watch the model code and just noodle away on guitar while it did its thing, interrupting it from time to time. Now they’re too fast for that to work, but still too slow for it not to be worth it to start a new task. It’s an awkward in-between stage.
If Anthropic made fast mode four or five times faster rather than just twice as fast, I’d probably shell out for it sometimes just to be able to single-task productively.
When you compile an ios app, or wait for some query result, search slack or wait for Github CI to finish, it all introduces significant wait between agent turns.
Models getting faster would help but would not eliminate the problem.
I try to work on planning docs, scrutinize them a fair bit to look for edge cases or anything that stands out as a problem, whatever.
Then break down the work further into meaningful chunks and hand those out to agents. Mostly one agent at a time but with the directive to use subagents as needed for implementation/review/whatever other perspective I want.
I feel like I'm exercising my brain similarly to how I had in the past. Before LLMs we'd whiteboard things similarly and figure out if a design made sense and like you said, chunk it into Jira tickets. it's really just the implementor (?) that's changed.
It's rare that with my 2 active things, they're both busy, since one usually finishes while I'm drafting my reply to the other.
When it occasionally happens that both are busy for the next 5 min, I just get to enjoy the break and stretch my legs and walk to the kitchen or something.