Parallel coding agents hit a human bottleneck: approvals, not compute
casualhermit · reddit · 2026-07-23
- The author argues that when several coding agents run in parallel, the real bottleneck is not compute but the human who must approve each prompt.
- The core product problem is keeping the phone and terminal in perfect sync so the user sees exactly the same question and options in both places.
- An early version guessed its own Approve/Deny buttons, but that was rejected as too risky for shell-command approvals.
- The current approach only renders the agent’s real question and real options; if the system is not fully certain, it shows the session instead of inventing UI.
- One unresolved issue is how to prioritize multiple agents that all block at the same time.
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