My most productive days now look like my laziest. I type for maybe 45 minutes across eight hours. I ship more than I used to in a week.
The shape of the work has changed. Traditional output is linear: you type, it accumulates. Agentic output is a step function. Long idle stretches, then a burst of parallel results you evaluate in minutes.
Play with the constraints. More agents help, but sequential dependencies limit the speedup. Agents fail. Crank the failure rate and watch the confidence band widen until the agentic curve dips below traditional. It happens sooner than you’d think.
This is a toy model. Real work has task dependencies, context switching costs, and coordination overhead that make the picture messier. But the basic shape holds: agentic work is bursty, and the returns come from staying available, not staying busy.
Two minutes on, twenty off. The optimal move is to interleave: kick off agents, go to a meeting, come back, review diffs, go for a walk, come back, review more diffs. Stretch the workday, take longer breaks, respond to prompts often. The highest-output version of this looks less like grinding and more like checking in between living your life.