Regarding the multi-tasking induced by this new way of working (agentic coding), I've moved from quick and short iterations to a longer ideally one-shot prompt, optimizing for less reviewing and less context switching.

I used to send a prompt as early as possible, meaning that'd really just give the rough idea, barely a sentence, and see what the model would come up with, thinking that I'd save time if it got it right for the first time, and maybe I'd just need to correct what it got wrong (it's faster at typing than me). That means a lot of multitasking at a rather high pace, which takes its toll if you do it for too long.

I've recently switched to writing longer prompts (doing part of the planning myself), hoping to get better results and to have less to review: I'm realizing I'd rather write more and read less, past a certain threshold. I don't really want to iterate with an agent; I want to tell it, maybe in somewhat verbose terms, what I want, I want a quick confirmation that it'll indeed work, and I want the final output (e.g. a commit), that's it.

That's probably what some users have been doing since the beginning, but with all the hype around this tech, maybe I got caught by this idea that with just a few words, I can get stuff done. In my experience, it's indeed just a few words, but for useless units of work (iterations with a model) rather than what I really want (commit) which itself will often require non-trivial amount of input. In this case, I'd rather give it all in one go, in a somewhat focused state.