Here's a question, to people who delegate all their coding to AI agents now: What are you doing to keep your mind exercised in all this suddenly new free time you have? Personally I find talking with agents extremely tedious and unrewarding; I would rather just write the code, even if it's simply because it's more interesting than playing Sudoku or whatever the fuck you do when you have nothing to do with your brain.

And talking to AI agents is not the same as using your brain. It's frustrating, it seems to be intelligent, you think you're using reason with them, but it rapidly degrades your ability to reason. It encourages you to accept answers without checking them thoroughly. So much for the skills of accuracy and integrity you built up. It's a sugar rush.

I don’t „talk” to my agents. I tell them what to do. If I need to „talk” it means something is going wrong and we need to figure out why agents are doing bad work - and this is intellectually challenging.

The effect you describe I had at times but with older/dumber models where you could spend a ton of time and the model was either too dumb to do it, or had a model dementia later in the context. Or when I didn’t really understand why it did a bad job and tried to stumble around in the dark - very mentally numbing.

Nowadays the model usually just had some bad tools or information required to do the job.

You need to switch into a product manager/QA/UI,UX mindset.

Is what is being built the right thing? Does it work? Is it usable? Has it been built in an appropriate way? (Note this is not a code thing, it’s an architectural question)

Traditionally developers have outsourced these things to other people.

There’s a further thing you should be doing - if the questions above didn’t pass - why not? What went wrong in your process?

Doing more, understanding more the tech of the project, exploring more ideas, the list is infinite

Who got more time thanks to AI ? I think a lot of us are working more instead

> keep your mind exercised

OK, so I'm still very low on the spectrum of "I just command it and sit back", but I think the final toolbox will at least include adversarial questioning of the bot. For example, "Why does that code do A, wouldn't B be better?" or "Would this code break if a C event occurred?"

Sometimes it reveals a bug or a questionable implicit assumption, other times it leads me to see another part of the code, and sometimes the thing just lies at me... But it does help you keep some critical-thinking practice.

Another task might be to find and refactor/rename parts of the code that are just... not easy for humans to grasp. Some readers are thinking: "No, the next edit will be by LLM anyway, leave it so the bot understands", however I think that's short-sighted: Either these things are going to become good-enough that they should cater to human comprehension, or else they've reached a plateau and we'll want something that can resist the chaos-rot.

Running 20 agents at the same time means a lot more task switching, its closer to team management, you may have one agent doing basic grunt work, so can be let alone, another one may be planning and designing, so needs a little bit more q&a, and others may be problem solving, and that does take a lot more supervision. But I have never felt like I have any free time, or down time, at the end of the day I feel far more mentily exhausted (in a good way) than any day before agentic development.

>Here's a question, to people who delegate all their coding to AI agents now: What are you doing to keep your mind exercised in all this suddenly new free time you have?

If you have a lot more free time you're not taking full advantage of agents. The time saved coding allows working on 4-6 projects simultaneously, and the majority of work is the hard design/product decisions that the agents can't do well themselves. Working on the hard parts of half a dozen projects simultaneously is far more mentally taxing than just hand-coding a single project, and with that many agents there'll usually always be one with a question for you so you won't have much extra free time.