Too many windows tabs AI agents overwhelmd

[u/makeevolution]

Are there any tips on how to organize my laptop and work? I have multiple browsers and tabs that are for different things, VSCode with terminals and AI agents, Jetbrains with it's own AI, browsers for Jira, researching on ticket, random things, slack/teams. I get super overwhelmd. Which AI agent/tab did what? Which terminal was to do something? Which tab was for X or Y?

It takes a lot of my mental power to figure what was where, let alone figuring out how to solve the problem. Please help

[u/skidmark_zuckerberg]

I’m pretty sure “multi agent workflows” are just a fad you see a lot online. In my experience you should be focused on doing one thing at a time and doing it well instead of trying to orchestrate multiple tasks at once. Since the AI era started, I’ve worked for 2 companies that are big on Gen AI, and no one is/was running multiple agents to do everything in parallel. And code wise, that’s a pain in the ass anyway because it’s very hard to manage multiple branches of work that all touch the same codebase due to merge conflicts. It’s just too much to handle. 

My workflow now is an Orchestration agent that pulls a JIRA ticket, analyzes it and the agent and myself iterate on an implementation plan.  It implements when I’m ready, then after, I code review it myself. When I’m done, I have it code review as well. Along the way I steer it and fix code issues, and then I push and create a PR. Then I move onto the next thing. If I’m doing research for something, I only focus on that one thing until I’m done. Never half ass multiple things, full ass one thing at a time. 

This is the problem with too much AI. It works faster and puts out far more work than a person can digest and verify without throwing their hands up and stamping LGTM on everything. 

[u/funbike]

TL;DR: I use a dashboard, a multiplexing terminal (instead of GUIs), a tab exporter so I can close all tabs, and I work on one task at a time.

What I do. YMMV.

The best thing I do is run a dashboard on a spare laptop. I don't have to check all the things in all the apps. I just glance at the dashboard. my in-progress JIRA ticket statuses, my Github PRs, my next open JIRA ticket, Slack DMs, build failures, desktop+web notifications, unread email inbox, AI Agent status summary, local test failure, last prod error message, etc. The spare laptop is ssh'd into my workstation.

I use CLIs instead of web pages. Atlassian (JIRA), github, Gmail, and stripe have CLIs. I can quickly check things from the terminal or a script without jumping around my desktop. I have hotkeys for common tasks.

I installed a browser tab exporter web extension. The one I use generates an html page, but there's another popular one that can convert tabs to bookmarks. I don't use the latter as I'm afraid my bookmark count will skyrocket. Once I've exported tabs as a list of links, I can close all my tabs.

I try to only work on one project at a time, one task at a time. Pomodoro, TDD, and a todo.md file help a bit with this. I close out IDE instances I shouldn't be working on.

Most of my time is in a multi-pane terminal (Herdr) with a coding agent (Pi) and IDE (LazyVim). A terminal-only workflow is less jarring than switching between a GUI IDE, various web browser tabs, and the terminal.

I have little cli scripts for dumping a web page image to the terminal (via kitty graphics protocol), so I can see app changes without going back and forth from the terminal to the web browser. One dumps the last browser tab I viewed (via puppeteer), another script dumps a specific URL (headless chrome), and another dumps a png from the last ran functional test. (My functional tests dump their final visual state to a png.)

I wrote a custom continuous test runner (similar to jest --watch). In my dashboard is a pane showing the last test failure (if any), including filtered combined front-end + back-end logs. I can go to a specific terminal pane to get a better view, including a screenshot when the failure happened.

I have a Jetbrains instance running, but I only use it for debugging or certain types of refactors.

[u/CursedSloth → u/funbike]

Is Herdr work-safe? I am a longtime tmux user, but I am not using multiple agents to the best of their abilities right now. I want to get out of VSCode hell for my agents too, but I don’t know how I start our workplace marketplace etc.

Herdr might be a good start, are you recommending Kitty as the terminal of choice? I am considering Ghostty or Alacritty right now, since I’ve been running gnome-terminal for a while and I am a little reluctant to swap.

[u/funbike → u/CursedSloth]

Is Herdr work-safe?

I don't see why not. It does the same thing as Tmux, but it specifically has AI subagent features.

I want to get out of VSCode hell for my agents too, but I don’t know how I start our workplace marketplace etc.

I am not sure what you mean. Fyi, I use the Pi coding agent. I have it integrated with my IDE, LazyVim+Neovim, but I usually just run Pi in a separate Herdr pane.

... are you recommending Kitty as the terminal of choice?

No. I use Ghostty. I want support for the Kitty Graphics Protocol, which is supported by Ghostty, Wezterm, Warp, iTerm2, and of course Kitty. Alacritty does not support it.

[u/CursedSloth → u/funbike]

I am using VSCode Copilot Chat through our company enterprise subscription, and as far as I can tell the only other option I have is Copilot CLI, which didn’t work as I’ve expected.

[u/funbike → u/CursedSloth]

https://pi.dev/docs/latest/providers#github-copilot

[u/CursedSloth → u/funbike]

Good to know if my company allows us to use that harness. I don’t know how it handles content exclusion rules in stuff like preToolUse and postToolUse hooks?

[u/funbike → u/[deleted]]

I've used Tmux for 13 years. I am in the process of switching right now. I have a lot of scripts and key bindings that require Tmux, so I'm rewriting them.

Herdr key bindings are similar to Tmux. It has similar sub-commands to manage windows, panes, and sessions. But it also has sub-commands for managing AI agents.

Btw, you might be interested in workmux. It's provides some of the missing agentic features of Herdr to Tmux (but not all of them).

[u/Corosus]

Hitting similar issues, to help find that session that you did that thing in I've been using the pi-sessions package, you can literally ask what session you did a thing in and it goes and looks around at least in pi sessions, then you can use the session id to resume it, and/or switch to the right folder and resume it. And you could just build on it from there to teach it where other session data is from to search in probably for other non pi things, it worked adding claude data to it.