{"canonical":"https://www.readysetcloud.io/blog/allen.helton/youre-still-the-bottleneck/","categories":["ai"],"contentText":"I went to a conference a couple of weeks ago. During the keynote, the speaker asked the audience “how many of you have 40 or more agents running at any given time?” About a dozen hands went up. He then asked “How many of you have 30 or more agents running?” Another dozen. This continued down to 20, 15, 10, 5, and eventually 1. Each time he asked, another 15-25 hands went up in the air.\nIt wasn’t until he got to 1 that I sheepishly put my hand in the air. Luckily I wasn’t alone, but it immediately got me thinking. I think we substituted one bad practice for another.\nRemember a few months ago when tokenmaxxing was a thing? If you don’t, good. You missed a terrible practice. People were taking pride in the amount of tokens they were spending regardless of the value they were getting. I still don’t really understand why that was a desirable thing.\nTokenmaxxing has settled down significantly, but I fear that it’s been replaced by something equally as bad: agentmaxxing.\nA quick Google search will show you there’s no consensus on what agentmaxxing means (honestly I thought I made it up until I Googled it). But what I mean when I say it is that developers are taking pride in the number of agents they have running at any given time. Jumping back to that question in the conference keynote, people are running upwards of 40 agents at any given time. 40?\nSo I asked the person who delivered the keynote how many work streams 40 agents represent. And he told me about 4.\nOk that makes so much more sense. He has four projects he’s working in parallel, each one with a single orchestrator and about 9 subagents each actually doing the coding. That’s better, but still a problem.\nYou can’t multitask like you think you can I have bad news. You can’t multitask. When you think you’re multitasking, you’re actually context switching really fast.\nThe more inputs that demand your attention, the worse it gets. I’ve had times where I’m talking to my wife, one of my kids starts pulling on my shirt to show me something, the other kid starts crying in the other room, while the dog starts scratching at the door to go outside. At best, I’m going to somehow defer three of them to later and work through them sequentially. At worst, I’m going to walk into the other room and yell into a pillow because I’m overstimulated. 😅\nNow, imagine that was four agents reporting back at the same time asking for approval or a design decision or reporting a CI failure on four different projects. With each task that lands back on your plate, you have to reconstruct the mental model of what that app is, what you’re trying to do, where the agent left off, then you can act.\nWould you be able to handle each one appropriately? Probably not.\nRealistically, you’ll probably hit the accept button without reading the context of the ask and tell your agents to just “fix it”. That’s what anybody would do when they make themselves the approval bottleneck across multiple unrelated contexts.\nWhen you start blindly approving tasks, you’re inadvertently delegating the decision-making to the model. At that point, what are you there for?\nYou are the decision maker Code is cheaper than it ever has been. As a developer, the amount of your value that comes from typing code is dwindling. And if that was the only thing you had to do as a dev, the answer to “will AI take our jobs” would be a whole heck of a lot scarier.\nOur value (among other things) comes from decision making. Weighing the risks, evaluating tradeoffs, and a nose for what looks right, to name a few. Some decisions are bigger than others, and the important ones need your undivided attention.\nI love AI, but it makes it way too easy to make bad decisions. And you often won’t know about it until you’re fighting a production issue when it’s significantly more expensive to change. If an agent spits out a 1,000 word response after a long-running task, your task is to make an informed decision using the provided context, ask questions, and think two steps ahead.\nIf you glance, hit accept, tab, glance again, and hit accept again, then you aren’t a decision maker, you’re a rubber stamp with a keyboard.\nAttention is your greatest resource I don’t want you reading this and your takeaway being “Allen says 40 agents is too many.” That’s not it at all. I’m not advocating for anything like that.\nWhat I am advocating for is not spreading yourself too thin. People have been saying for years that attention is one of the scarcest and most important resources we have.\nIn 2026, everything wants your attention. Humans have gotten really good at creating things that steal your attention away from something else. With coding agents, it takes almost 0 effort to bring in another work stream so you can “force multiply yourself.” Just open another terminal, type in claude and you’re (basically) done.\nProtect it. Treat your attention like the scarce resource it is. Keep the decision-heavy workstreams to a minimum, just 1 or 2. Then run as many low-judgment streams as you want next to them. But keep your attention on the tasks that need it. Don’t split your attention across decisions, because when everything is a priority, nothing is.\nNext time somebody asks you how many agents you have running, tell them that’s the wrong thing to be counting. The better question is how many decisions you’re actually making.\nHappy coding!\n","date":"2026-09-22T00:00:00Z","description":"The tech industry went from tokenmaxxing to agentmaxxing, which is arguably worse. Here's why.","image":"https://assets.readysetcloud.io/youre_still_the_bottleneck_feature.jpg","inLanguage":"en-US","lastmod":"2026-09-22T00:00:00Z","readingMinutes":5,"section":"blog","tags":["ai agents","developer productivity"],"title":"You're still the bottleneck","url":"https://www.readysetcloud.io/blog/allen.helton/youre-still-the-bottleneck/","wordCount":953}