Open four agent windows at once and the day disappears in a way that feels productive but isn’t. David Hoang, writing in Proof of Concept, puts it plainly:
At times, HITL [human-in-the-loop] agent orchestration feels addictive like Candy Crush or scrolling social media. Every prompt shows a stream of tokens and visible progress being made. You sit and wait to hit the number 2 or continue prompting. Instead of doom scrolling, you’re doom building; a sense of productivity which leaves you not doing anything else.
To be abundantly clear, I’m not against HITL and it’s a great way to build. What I’m saying is the massive productivity gains take a toll on you. I’ve shipped real work this way; being locked in for entire afternoons and evenings to prompt sessions. Sometimes I get good outputs and other times I don’t get anything valuable.
The orchestration tax is like the coordination tax at work. I’m feeling like I’m building but really air traffic controlling in parallel. You are reading partial outputs, deciding which to merge, which to discard, which to re-prompt. It’s a job, and an important one, but it’s not the deep work in design, writing, or thinking I need to do. That is a real job. It is not, however, the same job as design or writing or thinking. It uses a different part of you and it depletes a different reservoir. By the time I sit down to actually draw something or write a paragraph that matters, the reservoir is empty.
I orchestrated my way out of having anything to say.
Hoang’s analogy to coordination tax—the meeting load that eats the day at any tech company—is exact. Watching a token stream and deciding what to keep is real work. It is not the work you sat down to do. Orchestration spends from the same reservoir or account that making spends from, and you do not feel the withdrawal until the end of the day when you go to write the paragraph and there is nothing in the tank. Hoang’s tactical answer is to switch defaults: human-in-the-loop for the few things that benefit from your synchronous attention, human-on-the-loop for everything else, with a real review block on the calendar.
The shift is from watching to bracketing. Agents need start conditions and end conditions, not a babysitter in between.
