My cycle with agents has become: spend several days doing detailed planning architecture documents. Codify all new plans into Jira cards as isolated features. Mass fanout on the cards whenever possible with up to 32 agents running at a time, basically becomes a question frenzy for a couple crunch days. Stop and do testing and reviews for a week or two, I can generate up to 20 PRs per crunch day fairly reliably. Rinse and repeat. I feel lucky the type of software I'm producing is amenable to this process, some types aren't.

Not too dissimilar from my approach at work these days, sans the "up to 32 agents" bit.

I try to work on planning docs, scrutinize them a fair bit to look for edge cases or anything that stands out as a problem, whatever.

Then break down the work further into meaningful chunks and hand those out to agents. Mostly one agent at a time but with the directive to use subagents as needed for implementation/review/whatever other perspective I want.

I feel like I'm exercising my brain similarly to how I had in the past. Before LLMs we'd whiteboard things similarly and figure out if a design made sense and like you said, chunk it into Jira tickets. it's really just the implementor (?) that's changed.

After a week, my throughput is limited by compute to run tests/checks. Worse if I'm compiling Rust.

What’s the point of opening a PR in such a setup? Why not simply merge to trunk, and spin review agents?

What are you working on?