Laura Summers, writing for the Pydantic blog, describes the strange math of coding agents: the work can run in parallel, but our attention can’t.

Marcelo, another Pydantic colleague, when asked about his Claude Code session freezing said: “just open 5 claude sessions. You’ll never notice because you’re busy giving feedback to the others.” He was joking. I think. But it captures something true about the current moment. The parallelism is exhilarating and kind of feral. The number of things you can start has dramatically increased. The number of things you can thoughtfully finish hasn’t changed at all, because that part still requires the one resource we can’t parallelise: your brain.

The design version is easy to recognize: an agent can generate dozens of screens and states while one brain still has to judge the product intent and every edge case. You may spend less time drawing the interface, but every state still demands a decision.

Summers calls the emotional cost “the human reward function problem”:

Here’s a term for what I think is happening: the human reward function problem. In machine learning, a reward function tells an agent what good looks like. Writing code by hand was never easy, but it was full of small rewards. Solving a problem in your head. Understanding a gnarly bit of logic. Watching the code compile. The feeling of control. LLM-assisted programming has automated much of the work that generated those dopamine hits and replaced it with the cognitive load of review and supervision. The satisfying part shrank. The exhausting part grew. And there are no new rewards to fill the gap.

If you’re feeling like your work is simultaneously more productive and less satisfying, you’re not broken. The feedback loop is broken. And I think we need to start treating that as an engineering problem in its own right, not a personal failure.