Scaling Agentic Coding As If People Still Mattered

> The other week I read Gergely Orosz’s excellent post on the state of the tech industry in 2026. In that post, several prominent developers share how they work with 5-10 parallel agents, each one running in a separate terminal tab. This is a trend that I think is about to enter the mainstream. > > That trend also ties into a topic I’ve written about before: the cognitive cost of faster coding. Back then, I claimed that agentic coding is mentally expensive and more effortful than old-school manual coding. This time, I want to expand and revisit the human consequences of running five agents in parallel. I mean: what could possibly go wrong?