How I Beat AI Brain Fry by Turning My Work Into a Git-Based Queue
How I Fight AI Brain Fry
When juggling 20 AI chat threads left my focus shattered, I built a priority queue in git. Each ticket is a markdown file in the repo, and an agent works the board in cycles—researching, building, testing—while everything needing my judgment lands in a single inbox. I open one page, review the change, give a verdict, and close the ticket. The closing is the trick: context leaves with it, so I can focus on one thing at a time.
The ticket doesn't keep hanging in my memory as a thing to remember about. The context closes with it.
- eterm
I've learned that rather than juggle too much, I just accept that I'm still more productive than ever before, even if I'm "idle", it's important to take time to have a break and to recharge, refresh and reflect.
So I limit myself to at most 2 or 3 things at once, and if all of those are in long running sessions, well so be it, I know I'll be deep back in it soon.
But it's tempting to start "just one more session", especially something like getting it to better profile and improve performance. That feels super productive, but is often just to stop me feeling "idle".
- sollewitt
This only solves part of the problem, the other half is: ok so you have 3 chats going, at some point you realize you have 3 >10k line CLs to review, on top of code your colleagues are asking you to review.
Every review I’ve ever done I’ve found overfitting and brittle solutions and things tacked on instead of integrated so I refuse to give up on code reviews, but those are my real bottleneck, and having three is so much worse than one because my context and understanding is diluted and a bit muddled.
I want to time how long it takes me to land code and I suspect going serial on one thing will be faster than going parallel on multiple things. Parallel feels faster but the code review takes longer.
- docheinestages
Why start several threads in parallel to begin with? If waiting is an issue, maybe you should break that one task into multiple steps. That would only produce more output at a lower quality. Nothing has changed about the human thinking capacity. Focus on one thing and get it done.
- hetspookjee
I’ve tried this kind of format too but it didn’t stick for me as i was missing the rich context the sessions were able to provide for me. Specifically the lack of diagrams and other nice formatting that is possible in HTML files. I also tried linear as a broker in between for a while but it just blew up and became too tedious to navigate and ran out of sync fast. Also expensive on token overhead.
Currently what I task it to do is have one or multiple agent threads tied to a project work it and have this really token light skill laid out that leverages eleventy heavily and renders it as markdown file. Than paired with thisbit.ai (I made this and still am developing it) i just comment / voice over on all the bits from the article and have the agent take it from there again.
Also neither codex nor Claude code come even close to the lovely TUI renders of Gemini (Argon 4)
- silcoon
I think the problem is context switching. "I can work on three different tasks at once thanks to AI" seems really empowering, but in reality, it's impossible to focus deeply on one task if your thought process is constantly interrupted every few minutes.
Every time I find myself idling in front of a screen, I feel the need to find something else to do, a distraction to fill those 54s before the agent sends a notification that needs my attention. This isn't healthy, and it's not how the human brain works.
Long, uninterrupted sessions of deep concentration are what helped humans produce their best work so far.
- gb2d_hn
It's interesting watching everyone build their solutions to this new world of problems. Mine has been to double down on my markdown notes, extending https://app.etherpk.com so that every task (plain markdown) can be viewed under it's wikilink (or several) on a kanban board. An MCP server knows how to interact with the notes graph. I copy a reference to the task, hand it to an agent, and the agent works with blocks under the task from there. It basically means I can give the agent really rich context up front - images, excalidraw drawings etc and the agent can update the task as it goes. Having everything on a kanban board makes it easier to step away from a task to work on whichever really needs my attention and come back. Putting this together with herdr has been very productive. I still have to watch the brain fry, but it is helping. Don't know if I'm selling the idea but I feel like I'm on to something after experimenting with various systems similar to what the author is suggesting. I'm working on making a product of it. The onboarding needs some streamlining but it's available to use for free for local graphs.
- AnotherGoodName
I’ve moved on from tmux to the apps that come with the agents at this point.
Mainly just for the overview of workstreams in flight and the ability to have a tree of tasks and subtasks (you can have a branching tree of agentic sessions) which are each their own session. These apps can remote into the tmux sessions too so it’s not even a change of workflow so much as presentation. Multimedia input/output is nice too.
Still not perfect but it’s pretty clear the dev environment of the future is going to be more and more focused on jobs management. What jobs do you have in flight? How do those jobs relate to each other? What needs your attention?
- plasticchris
Remember when we got interactive collaborative text editing?
The future will be this, but it will be interactive collaborative agent sessions, and stuff like pi durable is already heading that direction.