Cal Newport talks about this in Deep Work. My key takeaway, not all jobs let you. As romantic as the CEO role is, they don't get to spend big blocks of time alone with their thoughts. They have to be on deck and directing whenever, wherever the flow of the business demands.

I feel like commanding a fleet of AI agents forces you into that kind of role. They get things done, but if you're not constantly checking up on them, the work isn't what it needs to be. Worse, it can turn out to be a big pile of tech debt.

I don't know what the answer is yet, it's both hard to keep up and work on my own terms. It's partly my own fault, I have a stack of PRs to review, merge and UAT. That's the deepwork stream now, but it's so tempting to just kick off another agent and have it flesh out something else from the backlog.