Type: url
Original: https://addyosmani.com/blog/cognitive-parallel-agents/
Status: generated
Summary
This April 2026 blog post by Addy Osmani argues that running multiple AI coding agents in parallel imposes a distinct, poorly-scaling cognitive cost on the human overseer — background vigilance (an “ambient anxiety tax”), constant judgment calls, and trust-calibration overhead — rather than simply multiplying throughput. It argues supervision bandwidth does not scale the way generation bandwidth does, and offers a personal calibration practice (time-boxing sessions, starting below one’s comfort threshold, watching review-quality confidence, and reducing task scope before reducing agent count) for finding one’s own sustainable “ceiling” for parallel agent work.