06-27
The Orchestration Tax: When Agents Parallelize but Your Attention Doesn't
Starting agents is cheap, but closing the loop (review, merge, judgment) must route through a single serial processor: you. The author frames human attention as the GIL for AI agents — you can spawn 20 agents, but your throughput to main is bounded by your serial review rate. Amdahl's Law applies: the non-parallelizable judgment fraction caps any speedup. Strategies include: scaling agent count to review rate, not UI; sorting tasks into async-able vs. judgment-heavy; batching reviews; making agents prove correctness with tests/screenshots. The insight: busy ≠ productive. Unpaid orchestration tax accumulates both technical debt and cognitive debt, silently eroding your mental model of the system.