Interesting read. I agree with the author, especially about the part about the normalizing of deviance. Although I do not interact with agents or LLM's anywhere close to the scale as the author does, and let's be honest here - running 8 different agents simultaneously, all with different tasks while telling yourself that you know what is being done, is honestly just poor judgement.

But I can absolutely see how a combination of the over-confident attitude from the LLM, with repeated success from tasks, and tiredness, will eventually lead the user to start assuming that repeated success, and forgetting to actually pay attention to what changes are being done and what the agent isn't proudly boasting about.

I had never really thought too much about WIP limits before reading this. I assumed they existed to encourage team members to help unblock each other, instead of picking up another ticket. However there is a cognitive reason, which is all the more pertinent with agentic coding.

We looked at the agents and thought: these things are cheap, they run in parallel, there’s no reason to limit how many I spin up. And that’s true — for the agents. The constraint was never the agents. The constraint is the single human in the middle whose job is to actually understand what came back.

This is old, old wisdom and we keep re-learning it. Jerry Weinberg, in Quality Software Management back in 1992, put a number on context switching: split your attention across two projects and you lose roughly 20% of your time to the switching itself. Add a third and you’re bleeding something like 40%. The lines on that chart are brutal, and — this is the important bit — they don’t care that your workers are robots. The switching tax is levied on you, the one doing the switching. Eight agents means you are basically not paying attention to any of them.

Kanban people have been shouting about WIP limits for twenty years for exactly this reason. Limiting work-in-progress isn’t about the capacity of the workers. It’s about the capacity of the system to finish things well. And a pile of half-attended-to agent output isn’t finished. It’s inventory. Expensive, unread, possibly-wrong inventory.