"You are a single thread resource"

05-29-2026

I do not take credit for this well thought out idea. I saw this in a twitter article by Addy Osmani.

In a world where code is free and agent orchestration is the standard, what is the bottleneck? I don't think the answer is complex: it's you.

Writing good software is hard and requires your attention. Switching between contexts has not gotten any easier.

In his article, Addy talks about how agents are cheap to start and painfully expensive to close. It's fun and relatively easy to come up with ideas, but who pays the price for closing those ideas out? You are a single thread process. Spawning more agents does not solve the fundamental bottleneck of judgement, and it likely adds to the problem.

So what's the solution? Well it's definitely not adding more agents. Whether you orchestrate 2-3 agents, or 10-20 agents, all decisions must go through you before code hits production. I personally enjoy working deeply with an agent about one problem at a time, while background agents work in the background to do bug fixes, fix string copies, update minor UI/documentation, etc.