When I stopped watching over my shikigami, they started spinning on their own
To be honest, for quite a long time, I would stay glued to the screen even after handing off work to the AI. At 2:00 AM, with three monitors lined up, I would watch with my own eyes as the shikigami (a swarm of AI agents) spat out code, one token at a time, interjecting from the side, "Ah, that's wrong." Before I knew it, I couldn't move from my chair until the generation was finished. I thought I was running the shikigami, but before I knew it, I had become the surveillance camera for the shikigami.
The more I ran, the more screens I had to watch.
The culprit behind the overload wasn't the parallelism
When you run multiple AIs at the same time, your brain naturally crashes. Most people go, "Well, I'll just reduce the number." I thought so too. But that was missing the point. The cause of the bottleneck wasn't the number of units. It was me, trying to watch everything. Whether it's one or ten, as long as I'm going in to grade every single output, the load will keep choking me.
Furthermore, surveillance occupies the highest part of the brain. If you sit in grading mode all the time, your head becomes capable of nothing but grading. You know, that "Oh, I should just do it this way" moment that comes to you while you're in the shower or taking a walk? That stopped coming entirely. If your brain doesn't have space, good insights won't come to you either. The idea that you're sharp because you're busy with parallel tasks is a lie; in reality, I was just filling the most important circuits with surveillance.
A Shinto priest does not watch over the shikigami
You've never seen a picture of a shrine priest standing with his arms crossed, supervising the work of the gods, have you? What a priest does is tidy up the shrine, place the offering box, wait for the oracle to descend, and distribute it to the people. He doesn't interfere with the process. He only holds the entrance (what to ask for) and the exit (how to distribute what comes out).
I've shifted my approach to that as well. I throw it out there first, even if it's rough. I only look at the parts of what comes back that are off-target. I don't read everything. I just make a judgment—GO or reject—and run the next one. I don't look at the middle of the process anymore. I was anxious at first, but once I got used to it, my mind started turning toward "designing things so they don't crash even if I don't watch", and that was far more productive.
You often see know-how floating around like "manage it properly" or "design the prompt before you run it." I usually do the opposite. If I try to design it before I delegate it, the design itself is such a drag that I never get started. The order is backwards. I throw it out first, and the AI misses the mark spectacularly. That way of missing tells me exactly, "Ah, I hadn't verbalized this part." Organizing isn't a prerequisite before delegating; it's like the dregs that are left over naturally after a few back-and-forth exchanges. The more you try to perfect it beforehand, the less you can move.
The more you let go, the more you gain
Once I stopped watching, the number of things I could run at the same time naturally increased. In the time I spent staring at one result, I could throw out three or four. If I send out, "Bring this and this to a draft by morning" before I go to sleep, it's in shape by morning. When the results are determined not by my own working hours, but by the shikigami's working hours, the scenery changes. Having dozens of small streams running simultaneously is no longer a pipe dream.
Of course, it's not free. I'm constantly being fleeced for offerings (API fees) for that. The gods don't work for free. I think, "Another bill?" but I pay it anyway. Compared to the days when I was carrying everything myself and collapsing in the middle of the night, being fleeced is a hundred times better.
In the end, the most effective move wasn't a new tool or a clever prompt. "Stop watching." That was it. A priest doesn't watch over the gods because he trusts them. I decided to trust the shikigami, too. Namu.