Make AI agents parallelize work — 5x-10x speedups by telling them to use your machine's cores
Daniel_Farinax · x · 2026-10-02
Daniel Farina shares a practical prompt technique: AI agents default to slow serial execution (one file at a time, one ffmpeg after another), making batch video jobs take 10-30 minutes.
His fix: tell the agent directly — "We have a monster machine. Check the cores and free RAM, leave some headroom, and use parallel processes to finish this as fast as possible." Splitting independent work across processes yields 5x, sometimes near 10x speedups on batch clips.
Caveats: gains are smaller for a single encode (ffmpeg already saturates cores); sometimes the bottleneck is the model not knowing your specs, or the job being unsplittable.
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