congratulations on your soon to be coming burnout.

Keeping that many tasks in parallel, running all the time will kill you.

If you have ever TL'd a team, it doesn't sound too crazy. I have 8 folks I generally talk to very consistently throughout the day. If I'm not in 1:1s with them I'm usually reviewing their changes or chatting with them over chat. I don't think I can do all of that and work with a bunch of AI windows, but I do think they could likely do something similar to me with several agents running in parallel.

Your team members can be held "accountable" of the code they write: they can explain it, defend it in a PR, take ownership of it.

Your LLM has forgotten whatever shit it wrote when you opened a new tab, and that responsibility is now on you. And it wrote absolute dog shit

I suppose it depends how hands-off the tasks are - I max out at 2 parallel sessions working on different parts and it's fairly exhausting once done. I can see the number of parallel work increasing if there's a good dev/test loop. But at $WORK, that's not usually an option.

So, hands-off meaning "just let the AI cook and don't check it"?

Either you follow everything it does, revise the plans, do the code review, manual adjustments, etc, or you run sessions in parallel, not being that attentive and constantly context-switch (also resulting in less attention I guess).

I fail to see the benefits honestly.

The constant context changes, mental overload, inability to focus on one thing and do it well is exactly what every software developer has been fighting against for the past thirty years because it leads to shit quality and burns you out. You're automating the burnout. Idling is a necessity, not an illness.

Your feature branch is to put things aside and send them to CI, or wait and think on them. Not to have four of them running in parallel in your head frying you.

> The constant context changes, (...)

After you put together a plan, today's models can take well over a minute to execute it. Also, your work shifts to code review and executing acceptance tests, followed by either tweaking your current change or moving on to the next change.

This is really not about context changes. This is about not having to switch contexts because your focus stays on architecture+review instead of having to do deep dives to type code around.

> Your feature branch is to put things aside and send them to CI, or wait and think on them.

No, not really. Feature branches, as well as most types of branches, is to set aside work fronts that are in progress and run in parallel.

>today's models can take well over a minute to execute it.

A full, whole, entire _minute_ ?! Sixty seconds ! Oh no, they must be optimized away, we do not deserve our free time like so, we should toil until we fall over because... Growth?

It's still context switching. Either what you're doing is surface enough that you don't give a shit, it doesn't matter and you don't review it anyways (so the only context is basically the prompt you wrote or the nth SELECT * FROM table CRUD piece of crap), or you're context switching and it's fucking you over. The context isn't about remembering how you write if err != nil, it's the expected behaviour of what you're working on.

You're not getting a promotion from doing this, you're getting burnout.

> Feature branches, as well as most types of branches, is to set aside work fronts that are in progress and run in parallel

They're not running in parallel, unless you use work trees. They were put to the side, because you can't continue or finish the work they're about. Even just three branches in parallel in a modestly active repo that happen to be long lived drift enough that just keeping them up to date with develop makes it a waste of time.

Focus on one or two things, and do them well.

That, or get checked for ADHD.

Don't be so dismissive. Every person is different, and you struggling with multitasking doesn't mean everyone is.

From [1]

The scientific study of multitasking over the past few decades has revealed important principles about the operations, and processing limitations, of our minds and brains. One critical finding to emerge is that we inflate our perceived ability to multitask: there is little correlation with our actual ability. In fact, multitasking is almost always a misnomer, as the human mind and brain lack the architecture to perform two or more tasks simultaneously. By architecture, we mean the cognitive and neural building blocks and systems that give rise to mental functioning. We have a hard time multitasking because of the ways that our building blocks of attention and executive control inherently work. To this end, when we attempt to multitask, we are usually switching between one task and another. The human brain has evolved to single task.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7075496/

Fair enough, so it's a misnomer. Let's call it task switching then, since we don't actually do tasks at the same time, but switch from one to the other. A Claude Code session helpfully prints a small tldr summary of the ongoing session, so that one can quickly onboard again to the task at hand. I do not find that draining, personally.

> A full, whole, entire _minute_ ?!

If you honestly had any concern about loosing focus and being forced to context switch, a 1 minute pause idling while waiting for something to happen would represent the root cause of your context switch problems.

> What do you think feature branches are used for?

Yak driven development.

It's great to work from home so you can take nice little micro naps while code's generating, reviewing, building, and deploying.

A calm attentive alternative of vibe coding: restful coding.

It's much easier to read and review code after a refreshing cat nap, especially with a real cat.

Too bad that's not usually acceptable to do that in the office. It should be! Slacking off by sword fighting all day is too exhausting.

https://xkcd.com/303/

Nap while you can. The baseline is slowly raising; AI fed with organization context will hunt you down and lay you off, as it has done at multiple companies this spring already.

I mean, I didn't read it as a joke. Taking a rest can lead to a clearer ability to think... thereby being more productive, not less.

For the record I took it 100% seriously, having been wfh since covid I’ve taken more than one nap during ‘work hours’ myself… I’m saying ‘spin up an agent and go for a long walk’ being ok is close to over and it’s over in some companies already - and it isn’t because they’re monitoring what you’re doing, it’s that they know what is possible from those few folks who don’t go for walks and spin up more agents instead.

>if skill == cleave and support == wide_sweep: make cleave radius bigger

if skill == cleave and support == focused_edge: make cleave smaller but stronger

if skill == cleave and support == twin_cleave and rule == guarded_arc: quietly move to the woods

>That can work for a demo. It gets rough once the game has lots of skills, supports, items, statuses, and encounter rules.

Laughs in path of building : https://github.com/PathOfBuildingCommunity/PathOfBuilding-Po...

Path of Exile has deeper mechanics than pretty much every other ARPGs out there, PoB covers the vast majority of them, in a beautiful mess of about 20k lines of calculations in various files.

Making it a "Compiler problem" makes it an unsolvable one in acceptable time.

Fun fact: it directly parses mods from their ingame description into a mod database that is basically a stringly typed list of whatever increases also. : https://github.com/PathOfBuildingCommunity/PathOfBuilding-Po...

Second fun fact: that's the one for Path of Exile 2, that has different mechanics. The PoE1 version is the same thing, except even larger.

So yeah, don't bother about making a compiler. Your compiler will figure out micro upgrades and die in three months when the game adds incompatible mechanics. Stay agile and on your feet.

Yeah, I think this is the real danger with this kind of approach: mistaking a useful pipeline for a universal mechanic language.

I’m not trying to build a PoE solver or make every future mechanic fit a clean algebra. The compiler analogy is smaller: authored content emits facts, rows keep provenance, caches are rebuilt in a known phase, and combat consumes the resulting runtime data.

The part I want to avoid is common mechanics becoming direct skill/support/item/status branches inside every skill implementation.

But I agree the weird cases need escape hatches. Some rules should probably be explicit hooks, and some unique mechanics may just deserve custom resolution code.

The interesting design question to me is where to draw that line: what belongs in the boring fact pipeline, and what should stay as hand-written mechanic code?

> Making it a "Compiler problem" makes it an unsolvable one in acceptable time.

If I understand correctly, "compilation" is needed only on equipment change. I remember some FPS drop in PoE when changing the gear too.

>in a beautiful mess of about 20k lines of calculations in various files.

And is it actually suitable for realtime? PoB is not a realtime application.

Stat recalculations are pretty much immediate, yes. The only thing that takes a while is calculating the nodes with the most potential gains, since you're in effect calculating reachability, combined stat increases, etc, which is a few thousands to millions of calculations depending on how far you look.

FPS drops in PoE would not be caused by damage recalc: this is done entirely server side and on application of the damage/dot tick. That drop you're seeing is just loading the assets and recompiling some shaders, if anything.

But also: it doesn't need to be realtime. Your damage is a simple math formula, applied against another for enemy defense, for each hit instance. There are definitely some builds that stress servers due to the sheer amount of hits/tick, but that's a matter of optimisation. PoE lowers server ticks when it can't follow.

The post is talking about optimizing for build damage/resistance/etc, crafting a build. Which probably doesn't even take into account conversion shenanigans, over time things like wardloop that requires setup, cwdt and a load of other things. This is not an optimizable thing in any reasonable time, and human application of logic is pretty much faster.

Small clarification: I don’t mean optimizing buildcraft in the Path of Building sense, as in searching the space of possible gear/tree/support setups and finding the best upgrade.

I mean the engine-side representation problem after the player already has a concrete setup.

So the “compiler” part is closer to:

equipped skills/supports/items/statuses -> emitted modifier/behavior rows -> dirty derived caches -> runtime facts consumed by combat

The output is not “the optimal build.” The output is things like increased damage, more multipliers, pierce count, area radius delta, conversion rules, status payloads, etc.

I agree that global build optimization quickly becomes a much harder and more human-guided problem. I’m mostly interested in how to keep normal runtime resolution from becoming a giant matrix of skill/support/item/status branches.

> they're buying their lives

Extortion is the word that summarizes your point.

Ah yes, extortion is not the part where their disproportionate centralisation of wealth threatens your very livelihood with every action they take. Extortion isn't when they happily tell you they're going to replace you with AI. Extortion isn't when they steal your money with unpaid hours, it isn't when they threaten to fire you if you don't shut the fuck up and do as they say, when they act as a state within the state, corrupting institutions and polluting the very ground you, your children and your food grow on, it's when they're being held accountable for their actions and told that if they're going to have a personal wealth equal to that of millions, they also have the sum of responsibilities of these millions.

Just so you know, careers as a bootlicker are kind of a dead end.

Careers of insulting people are also kind of a dead end.

Oh no, don't worry, that's a hobby. Never monetize your hobbies, it takes all the joy away from it.

You clearly don't understand psychology at all. Rule by fear has a major downside that Machivelli warned about. If you keep people under threat all the time, as soon as the threat fails and you can no longer point a gun at your head they preemptively kill you and feel good about it.

Threatening violence to get what you want always ends with you being out-violenced by a bigger thug.

This is how alpha chimps function in their tribe. They resort to war and violence to prolong their rule, and it works for long enough, thats all they need for the cost-benefits to be worth it on their side.

In humanity, being the alpha chimp, you can actually just run away from the tribe with all your wealth instead of outright die and form a new identity and start a life elsewhere and change your last name and go somewhere not well known, and if you and your family does this for enough generations you are forgotten.

I think this might explain the rotten apples at the tip-top of our industrial/societal wealth classes. I think they are these people, played out over generations, having somehow survived the system that used to make it impossible to do this when at the chimp level (or even medieval maybe, maybe this new form of evasion only arose in the industrial age).

Okay sure. What other concept or label would you recommend I use to describe a leader in a tribe?

It's only by fear if they don't understand how to restrain themselves. Behave well with all your wealth, and nothing will happen: it's the same reason why wealthy patrons of art and craftsmen were at least respected, and why things ended poorly for robber barons.

And no, I do not believe that Musk's flabby arms or Bezos' shiny head are a threat of bigger violence to me anyways.

Tough fucking luck. I missed out on Alive 2007 because I was too young, on Lady Gaga because my partner got sick and we had to resell the tickets (at the exact same price we bought them for. And someone else bought them for that exact same price). Will I ever see Muse? Fuck if I know.

> The end result of this is stupid: "Sorry, kids. None of you get to go to the concert that you already have a ticket for. Life is hard."

Life is hard and they missed Olivia Rodrigo. The kids will survive through it, I promise. It's life, they'll see another concert. Most children in the world do not go to see concerts at 11 either.

Understood: Kids aren't important.

Or perhaps: The suffering is the point.

Copy! Over!

Kids aren't important when you're trying to make everyone's lives worse, indeed.

I sure hope I wont't find anything in your history protesting against widespread surveillance, because as we know, its's to protect the children. But you're not a hypocrite picking and choosing your arguments to make shitty points on HN, right ?

> Kids aren't important when you're trying to make everyone's lives worse, indeed.

Understood it the first time, thanks: Kids aren't important. Their feelings might not even be real; and even if they are real, then the disappointment will just toughen them up (the suffering is the point).

I do not agree with what I think you're repeating, but I do believe that I've heard it twice, now.

> I sure hope I wont't find anything in your history protesting against widespread surveillance, because as we know, its's to protect the children. But you're not a hypocrite picking and choosing your arguments to make shitty points on HN, right ?

Go ahead and dig around. My writings here are an open book. My words can live in your head for as long as you want them to.

You don't need me to tell you that you're free to make as many comparisons as you wish, regardless of any incongruity in those comparisons. You're a free-thinking adult like [most of] the rest of us here on HN are.

What say you?

Oh no, the unions are going to demand fair pay and good working conditions :(

Even unions like SAG-AFTRA, which is one of the most extreme ones I can consider barely reach 1% of the harm employers cause.

It's the same in Romania. Union leaders are rich.

"I will cripple you" must have referred to the bosses, not the entire country including his people. Idk why it matters that he had a gold chain. Are people without tech jobs not allowed to have money?

Yeah this brief out of context video is obvious proof that unions are the #1 problem in society. A prole with a Rolex?!? If we allow dockworkers to wear Rolexes then the entire social order will break down! What happened to the America I grew up with when only a vampire CEO could afford a Rolex? Oh the humanity..

This guy is a "vampire CEO." He isn't a dockworker, lmao, those are the people he is parasitic off of. He's a union boss lording over the dockworkers threatening to pull them off the job, basically the CEO of the union. That's the hilarious part. He's effectively a union CEO throwing a tantrum asking America not to upgrade the technology of their ports so he can become even richer. He goes out of his way to make clear he's not in it for the benefit of the workers, he brags about threatening to put construction workers out of the job so this top 1% union boss can become even more of a fat cat. There is nothing out of context, you can watch the entire thing if you like, he is straight up threatening to cripple the entire USA.

I don't give a shit a CEO or a dock worker has a rolex and a gold chain. I do care that they bling them out on TV while with their hand out for charity in the form of asking for Luddism. Probably not a smart move for that person pretending to be a broke charity case while also coming out with threats against everyone's livelihood.

Cool, nationalise SpaceX, reintegrate its costs into NASA, done.

The US would never let its access to space be cut off.

The US actually did just that when it retired the shuttle program. We had to rely on Russia to get to the space station.

Watch lmao.

Unfortunately, the clowns get in those higher places because they own the circus already. I stopped counting the amount of times CEOs and CPOs told me "No more meetings to plan out what will happen, there's too many of them, let's dev it and see what happens" (most of the time, this is a world destroying, change-half-your-data-format-under-your-feet event).

But make no mistake: this is also a result of so many countries' piss poor work laws. I can push back against my CEO and happily do so and tell him it's a terrible idea, because the worst that happens is that he gets pissy, but I will not get fired because of it, not get fired because of putting it in writing, because firing people for that would be wrongful termination. Boeing scale fuck ups could only have happened in the US because those engineers would be fired for speaking out.

In what country wouldn’t you get fired for that?

As the other comment says: all of Europe. Sure, it doesn't get promotions, and may put you their shit list. But you're not getting fired. Not directly.

All Europe, I think.

> Honestly, with the first step, it seems the PMs are already halfway there to implementation of the feature so I wonder if in the future they'll just do everything themselves

Yes please, I've seen the vibecoded slop PMs put out every day because software engineering is simply not a skill they have, and I'd love to make a LOT of money fixing their crap once it dies in production <3

I’m a former PM who’s now a founder and all the engineers I worked with loved me.

I can tell you right now most pm’s are absolutely useless and glorified project managers who don’t know how to think and get in the way - and don’t know how to enable engineers to be more productive.

I already do the latter, not very difficult to get into. Good consulting money.

Every moment you spend doing accessibility is a moment you spend not doing other things. You could argue it has a high RoI to do accessibility, fine, but that doesn't make it lazy _not_ to do it. Maybe I have even higher RoI/EV stuff to be doing.

You just told a bunch of potential and current customers that they're not worth the ROI.

Pretty sure they'll remember that, and they'll talk about it a lot.

Picking subsets of customers to focus on is a totally standard part of running a startup or company in general, so this is not really news or any kind of threat.

You might as well tell me the suburban moms are not going to buy my developer tool because I've personally slighted them with the branding. Why would I care? I made my decisions knowing this.

In fact ditching low RoI customers is incredibly common and good startup advice.

This is just admitting that your product is small and unimportant.

Hardly, I can trivially find Fortune 500 websites without accessibility.

As if that’s a bad thing.

Lifestyle businesses are king.

Who wants to be important?

I’d rather be happy.

I suspect as the years change and you continue to get older you will likely revisit this idea mentally.

But you do you, boo

Ok well enjoy your thought-terminating cliches in the meantime

Accessibility is done while you do it. Not as an afterthought.

But if you're having a higher ROI writing absolute crap, feel free, it's not my website.

> Maybe I have even higher RoI/EV stuff to be doing.

I mean, to readers of these comments, I think it's right there for you: 0x3f will take "higher ROI" over "accommodate and support disabled people".