Thariq tells agent multitaskers to slow down, dax refuses
The throughput boast finally gets a direct objection, and the reply is a joke that doubles down.
Thariq thinks the people running several agents at once should slow down. His argument is not that parallel agents do not work. It is that most of what they are being pointed at is not worth doing, and that the operator running six threads has stopped asking which one is the real one.
most of the stuff you're doing wont really matter- what's your P0?
The post is two sentences. He asks what your P0 is, the one thing that actually matters, and what it would look like if you gave that your full attention instead.
dax replied that he has only just started really ramping up his multitasking, and framed stopping now as absurd. It is a joke, and it is also the position. He is not disputing the premise, he is declining to act on it.
Why this lands now
The last two weeks have been one long throughput boast. Kent C. Dodds said he merged 110 PRs in a day from his phone. Julius said his agent merged almost 400 performance PRs in 30 hours. Theo published a 24 day tally. Every one of those numbers counts output. None of them counts whether the output mattered.
Thariq's post is the first direct objection to the frame rather than to the tooling. Merged volume is a measure of how much the agents produced, not of how much of it needed to exist. A pile of merged performance patches and a shipped P0 look identical in a commit count and nothing alike in a roadmap.
The counterargument dax is gesturing at, without making it, is that cheap parallel work changes which tasks are worth starting. When the marginal cost of a second agent is near zero, the bar for pointing one at something drops, and the small stuff you would never have staffed gets done anyway. That is a real answer to Thariq. dax did not give it. He said he is going harder.
Nobody in this exchange produced evidence either way. It is one engineer saying attention is the scarce input and another saying throughput is, both from the same week in which the throughput numbers got large enough to be worth arguing about.
i just started really ramping up the multi tasking now you're asking me to chill
Have the good opinion, not the loud one
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