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Don't Wait for Claude

jeapostrophe.github.io

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Re: Don't Wait for Claude

#2

Post by polyterative »

Don't really agree, in my experience the switching context is extremely costly. I personally have trouble having even a couple of sessions running in parallel,Especially when I'm talking difficult hard to solve problems. Of course it's easy for trivial jobs, but it's not always the case. I have been much more successful in making my time worth by taking a look at the model's output and actively participating.It gives me time to think as well.When I have a list of simple tasks I just tell it to the model and it executes one after another.

Re: Don't Wait for Claude

#5

Post by lanyard-textile »

polyterative wrote: post #2

Don't really agree, in my experience the switching context is extremely costly. I personally have trouble having even a couple of sessions running in parallel,Especially when I'm talking difficult hard to solve problems. Of course it's easy for trivial jobs, but it's not always the case. I have been much more successful in making my time worth by taking a look at the model's output and actively participating.It gives…

I can do two or three at a time. I treat them a bit like queues: Last in first out, sort of like we do with our human peers.

We delegate work, we tend to some other work, and we code review much later in the day.

The secret to this mindset is that it doesn't always have to line up. Let your agent wait for you; You'll get to their output next.

Re: Don't Wait for Claude

#6

Post by mbo »

I'm not sure I'm understanding this workflow. Perhaps a small tutorial / walkthrough hosted on YouTube or asciinema might help people understand.

Re: Don't Wait for Claude

#8

Post by trjordan »

I'd offer a different approach: think about how you're going to validate. An only-slightly-paraphrased Claude conversation I had yesterday:

> me: I want our agent to know how to invoke skills.

> Claude: [...]

> Claude: Done. That's the whole change. No MCP config, no new env vars, no caller changes needed.

> me: ok, test it.

> Claude: This is a big undertaking.

That's the hard part, right? Maybe Claude will come back with questions, or you'll have to kick it a few times. But eventually, it'll declare "I fixed the bug!" or summarize that the feature is implemented. Then what?

I get a ton of leverage figuring this out what I need to see to trust the code. I work on that. Figure out if there's a script you can write that'll exercise everything and give you feedback (2nd claude session!). Set up your dev env so playwright will Just Work and you can ask Claude to click around and give you screenshots of it all working. Grep a bunch and make yourself a list of stuff to review, to make sure it didn't miss anything.

Re: Don't Wait for Claude

#9

Post by rybosworld »

polyterative wrote: post #2

Don't really agree, in my experience the switching context is extremely costly. I personally have trouble having even a couple of sessions running in parallel,Especially when I'm talking difficult hard to solve problems. Of course it's easy for trivial jobs, but it's not always the case. I have been much more successful in making my time worth by taking a look at the model's output and actively participating.It gives…

There's a lot more "telling" than "showing" going on.

By that I mean - the people claiming hyper-productivity from their GasTown setup never have actual products to demo.

Re: Don't Wait for Claude

#10

Post by hirako2000 »

mbo wrote: post #6

I'm not sure I'm understanding this workflow. Perhaps a small tutorial / walkthrough hosted on YouTube or asciinema might help people understand.

It's just a process to loop over a number of cycle prompting each thing taking minutes to run. It's a recipe for a massive headache as context switching costs more than 7 minutes (that arbitrary number the article came up with)
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