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The coming coordination calamity
(surfingcomplexity.blog)
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this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
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Programming
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Is anyone actually productively running multiple agents at once? All the context switching in such a short time span feels like a great way to completely forget what you are doing and losing tasks in the mess.
Yeah, AI gets notably worse when it has too much context, even worse than too many managers.
Multiple top-level agents can't modify the same codebase simultaneously, they'll confuse each other. But you can instruct the main agent to spawn sub-agents that it coordinates for you, to increase throughput and reduce token consumption.
that's why claude uses git work trees exactly for this use case
No but you can lie to yourself that you are.
I am getting in the habit of keeping one async agent going in the background working on things while I also use ai in windsurf.
I think windsurf supports this natively with their background agents, but I run my background task in Claude code because then I can use my local qwen 3.6 27b
What does this parallel work mean? Does the background agent work on the same codebase as you? Doesn't that cause conflicts and confusion?
Nah I typically have it doing something else. And every 15m or so I toggle back and do next step.
Quite often Sysadmin stuff too. I have it do ansible for my pi cluster, and general cluster maintenance like check backups, troubleshoot services, create a firewall rule, etc.
I’ll also ask it research style stuff, like “check out ram usage of ai-1 box and lmk if cache is big enough for 5 concurrent full contexts. If not, change the recipe and restart it. “
But what for? Just to burn your employer's tokens to teach them that AI is a waste of money? (I mean, I'd respect that.)
I am self employed. I do it because it allows me to do my work in less time, or do more work in the same amount of time. Sometimes I’m having it do little personal projects in the background.
$20/mo for a windsurf sub. Plus like I said, I run qwen 3.6 locally (free) and get very productive output, and that’s also private, which is the main reason I invested in hardware.