Concurrency Is Not Parallelism: Rob Pike's Distinction Applied to Running Coding Agents
blaizedsouza · x · 2026-11-12
- Concurrency = dealing with lots of things at once (tasks interleaved to use resources efficiently); parallelism = doing lots of things at once (work truly simultaneous across cores/systems).
- Concurrency manages complexity; parallelism increases throughput (Rob Pike's framing).
- Context switching stays cheap only when the scheduler knows which task is ready — an event loop doesn't poll every connection, the OS tells it which have data.
- With coding agents running in parallel, the scheduler is you: opening each session to check completion is the expensive part, the agent-era version of this classic distinction.
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