We keep celebrating how fast we can code with vibe coding tools like Cursor and Copilot. What we rarely talk about is the cost. Constant context switching cost.
The autocomplete feels fast but the tool keeps pulling me back for micro checks. Most of the time I feel like I am just staring at the screen waiting for it to finish a thought, then correcting it, then nudging it again. I am unable to queue new tasks up. It is reactive work, not deep work.
I used to think attention was the bottleneck. Now it feels like the real issue is that these tools do not do true asynchronous work. They wait for me. I wait for them. The loop kills flow.
This is why I am becoming convinced the current copilot model is a dead end for senior work. The next real shift is asynchronous coding agents. Not assistants that autocomplete while I steer but background contributors that take a task and produce a pull request while I move on.
Some tools already hint at this. GitHub Copilot Agents, Jules, Codex and Claude Code for Web. You assign something like fix this UI bug and later you get a complete PR with a natural language summary, code diffs and even before and after screenshots. The unit of review becomes intent verified pull requests instead of line by line babysitting. But it's currently in a very primitive state.
Overall this shifts us from human in the loop to human on the loop. We oversee the work at a higher level instead of being dragged into every micro decision.
It frees up time to focus on the complex problems we do not trust AI to solve yet. I want to focus on more of those complex tasks while an agent upgrades dependencies or improves test coverage in a separate PR. That is real parallel work.
Is anyone else feeling the distraction tax with current tools?
We keep celebrating how fast we can code with vibe coding tools like Cursor and Copilot. What we rarely talk about is the cost. Constant context switching cost. The autocomplete feels fast but the tool keeps pulling me back for micro checks. Most of the time I feel like I am just staring at the screen waiting for it to finish a thought, then correcting it, then nudging it again. I am unable to queue new tasks up. It is reactive work, not deep work. I used to think attention was the bottleneck. Now it feels like the real issue is that these tools do not do true asynchronous work. They wait for me. I wait for them. The loop kills flow. This is why I am becoming convinced the current copilot model is a dead end for senior work. The next real shift is asynchronous coding agents. Not assistants that autocomplete while I steer but background contributors that take a task and produce a pull request while I move on. Some tools already hint at this. GitHub Copilot Agents, Jules, Codex and Claude Code for Web. You assign something like fix this UI bug and later you get a complete PR with a natural language summary, code diffs and even before and after screenshots. The unit of review becomes intent verified pull requests instead of line by line babysitting. But it's currently in a very primitive state. Overall this shifts us from human in the loop to human on the loop. We oversee the work at a higher level instead of being dragged into every micro decision. It frees up time to focus on the complex problems we do not trust AI to solve yet. I want to focus on more of those complex tasks while an agent upgrades dependencies or improves test coverage in a separate PR. That is real parallel work. Is anyone else feeling the distraction tax with current tools?