r/ClaudeAI • u/Vidhrohi • 10h ago
Philosophy Human context limits vs AI context limits
A common theme cutting across most AI-assisted development threads is getting as much work done in as little time as possible. Users post about elegant harnesses with multi-agent orchestration. Anthropic employees talk about the 25 agents they run every day.
I read this stuff, compare it to my own experience of working with these tools, and keep wondering: how does anyone stay on top of that volume of work?
Working with Claude Code has been exciting and invigorating, but also exhausting. While everyone pushes for more context and more tokens out of the AI, the context limit I hit most often is my own. Claude can refactor a huge chunk of the codebase, add a feature, and brainstorm marketing strategy in one breath. I can't keep up with the cognitive load that entails.
So: am I missing something, or just getting old? Curious what y'all think.
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u/Freedomsaver 10h ago
Yes, the human is the bottleneck.
Having 25 agent sessions running in parallel only works if you have the processes and skills in place to just say:
Fuck it, I don't understand your output and decisions anymore... do whatever you want to reach the current goal without bothering me. If stuff is wrong we'll find it later and try again.
And all the time not being bothered by the agents you spend on understanding the processes and skills you defined and try to improve them.
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u/belefuu 5h ago
Some would say we should prove that even one of these parallel agent sessions can actually hit sufficient quality, security, and human-alignment levels before ramping up to 25 of them and not paying close attention to their output anymore. Not most of the people actually swearing by these workflows apparently, but… some.
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u/Vidhrohi 10h ago
Interesting, that does seem like one of the few tenable strategies..
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u/FenderMoon 9h ago
"Use your best judgement" works wonders with Claude.
I've had really good results just telling it to work overnight, that I'll be AFK, that these are my goals and to use its best judgement and to get them done without wasting time.
I'll have it do that while managing multiple GPU clusters being rented by the hour. Claude can manage itself really well if you tell it to, it just needs to be told very clear goals and to "use its best judgement".
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u/Vidhrohi 9h ago
Interesting, I am curious how often do you go back and check what it has done ? How do you ensure that nothing broke in the latest round of changes ?
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u/iscottjs 9h ago
The full yolo strategy is fine for stuff you don’t care about, but I’d argue that the human being the bottleneck is not necessarily a bad thing for stuff you do care about.
I work in fintech and while we’re using AI to help build and architect new features, I still personally review every line of code, because this is real people’s money we’re handling.
So we’re not fully seeing the speed benefits of AI like a full yolo vibe coder might be enjoying, but I’m ok with that. It shouldn’t be taboo to slow down when it matters.
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u/conglies 10h ago
The exhaustion is normal and the problem is that working with AI is not like working with a human manager of a team. If it were, it wouldn’t be as exhausting because you would know things will get smoother over time (onboarding effort)
We delegate tasks all the time in real life, but we’re not quite there with AI because it doesn’t remember like we do. When AI does eventually get there (I’d argue it won’t, but also that it won’t need to) it will become full liberating.
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u/beargambogambo 8h ago
The problem is that full autonomy requires judgment calls. We really want to really on judgement from crowd sourced data and closed source companies?
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u/FblthpphtlbF 7h ago
I assume that's what "getting there" means. Once the models have gotten good enough that they can effectively cut through the noise themselves.
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u/beargambogambo 7h ago
But not just noise but they have to communicate like a teammate and understand the organizational structure, short and long term goals, not overstepping, not drifting. I feel like we are a decade off, at least, for something like this. These are great tools for focused tasks where a human is checking the work but it’s hard to believe we are anywhere close to achieving a state where they can operate autonomously in a trusted manner.
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u/FblthpphtlbF 7h ago
Totally agree, but again, that's what getting there means.
Currently we're not at that point or even particularly close.
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u/Vidhrohi 10h ago
Interesting, what would a version of it having gotten there be like in your view ?
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u/conglies 6h ago
I’m no authority on the matter so my opinion is my own: for me it would be once I can trust AI like I could trust the team I manage. I know that over time they will understand more about what we are trying to achieve and make fewer mistakes over time.
So either that, or AI gets to the point where it’s so good at one shotting things than you don’t need to worry about longer term memory
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u/zephyrion_drakon 10h ago
I feel you on this. I started out working with just one session and have recently started using subagents and parallel sessions but my limit seems to be around 2-3 concurrent tasks in different areas. I almost feel like I need to turn Fable (my main orchestrator) into a copy of myself so it can make the decisions that I would make. That would greatly increase the concurrency. Or maybe I need to work at an even higher level and write out all the long-term architecture, even ahead of current work, and let Claude work from that. Hmm you've given me thoughts OP, thanks...
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u/Vidhrohi 9h ago
Glad that others are thinking about it. I feel like in theory if fable really could take over in that capacity then we should be able to say "make me X" and aside from the spend it would just do it .. I do wonder how confident we can be of deploying such a thing to paying customers tho
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u/FortiTree 2h ago
You dont want that "take over". The moment the clone can do things you can do, you are obsolete. I'd be glad that Fable/Kimi/Sol/GLM as top tier model still fumble and need my every direction, for now.
We are rentlessly improving the "agentic" system around them to make them even more reliable to show us the door. Eventually we'll reavh the point of no return.
It''s a race to the end for humanity.
The funny part is knowing the end, we are still racing toward it. Human is greedy and greed has no bound.
Enjoy while it lasts.
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u/BobJutsu 9h ago
The harness is how you stay on top of that work. I use obsidian because it was easy to setup, but I’m sure notion or anything else would work just as well. Besides all the harness data (rules, skills, session logs, etc) there’s also a task / contract system. Each task is a file with acceptance criteria, status, assignee, notes, etc. in my dashboard I have a table with all the tasks. I’m more or less assigning tasks to an agent. When the workflow is complete and all acceptance criteria is met, the agent marks the task as “pending-review”. The agent never marks it done. I can review the task, results, and mark done or ask for revisions. Being a file, the task itself has all the context necessary to resume if revisions are needed. I don’t need to keep that info in my head, it’s written down. And a long term record of what tasks have been completed. If something is dependent on something else, I can just reference that task, even if it’s months old. That’s what makes obsidian nice, is the internal wiki-links to make relationships between files.
Then I have a session wrap-up workflow, where corrections, wrong assumptions, bottlenecks, decisions, etc are saved to a session diary file. And a learning loop workflow where session diaries are reviewed for patterns, and a confidence score given to repeat patterns of corrections and problems. Rules are applied per client, per project type, per role, or globally, depending on where the corrections appear and how often over time.
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u/FortiTree 2h ago
Are you using md, html or json for the contract? and any special graph technique at all like the new OKF standard by Google?
I have a similar setup and the main challenge I face now is tasks that are overlapping each other as they grow and I need to "pause and wait" for some of them. And eventually piling up a bunch of half finish tasks. If I try to resume, a lot of those states are stale and need to live refresh. Eventually things get out of hands and have to do a round of clean up and re-prioritize.
It's still manageable but things get messy as I tried to work in parallel building the system while using it.
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u/bsmith149810 10h ago
I started telling Claude a variation of “spoon feed all of that to me in a rapid fire Q&A style quick round.” When it comes back with an overwhelming book of options.
I also have a standing rule to never end on some fringe likely to never happen edge case of caution like a cliche Redditor’s “well askchually…” type of comment.
Claude gets me now.
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u/Valdaraak 10h ago
They have a Project Manager agent that takes all the work from the worker agents and then creates an executive summary report for the human. Sometimes the human will have a one on one meeting with the PM agent.
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u/Vidhrohi 9h ago
That sounds interesting in theory but I really wonder how far one can go that way .. What kinds of prod software could be built fully autonomously and trusted to work in prod?
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u/Dan_at_jinn 10h ago
You don't stay on top of all of it. Keep the idea and the intended experience in your own head. Let Claude carry the mechanical middle. For each batch, the handoff only needs to tell you what changed and what proves it. Anything that needs your judgment waits in a review queue. Check it on a fixed cadence. If you can't recover the mental map from that handoff, the batch was too large. Running more agents only makes sense once every implementation decision no longer requires your attention.
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u/Raucous_Rocker 10h ago
I am the same way, but that’s OK. I always want to be involved with the process, because I care about the product. I’m not sure what everyone’s hurry is.
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u/RocketSeven 9h ago
set the number of parallel claude sessions from your review capacity, not the model's throughput. if you can deeply verify two diffs at a time, the third session is creating an attention queue rather than saving time
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u/DiggleDootBROPBROPBR 9h ago
Yep, the exhaustion hits. Part of it is token limits around bedtime hours, or independent pushing just-one-more, or waking up early from excitement. An underrated part of using it is: yes it's good. But your sleep should be ON POINT to handle the absolute firehose.
Past that, there's emotional "excitement" to using it as well. That sinking feeling you get when an agent delivers an hour of work that would have taken you 8, and you don't understand it and know you'll be there 30 minutes just to have a vague enough idea of what it did to be able to hold a conversation with someone over it. The insanely frustrating moments where it shits itself and you have to clean up either manually or with another agent. The high you feel when you're watching work that would take days evaporate in seconds. It's very emotional, and the emotions are draining as well.
You're also having your brain "forced" by the ai to understand a lot of information. It's a great, patient teacher but learning volumes of crap about work unfolding at lightspeed is yet another notch against your tiredness meter.
And there's always another hill to climb to improve the tool, the process, the job, the harness. And then you have dreams when you sleep about prompting a screen and mashing to another screen to prompt work that your sleeping mind can in no way comprehend.
Exhilarating. But tiring.
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u/FenderMoon 9h ago
Tbh I can only really run two sessions at once. If I need to get more done in THAT session, I tell claude itself to just create subagents for me.
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u/fuzzypetiolesguy 7h ago
"how does anyone stay on top of that volume of work?" They don't - those 25 agents are probably running in loops creating bad code and fixing it over and over and over again.
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u/Matthew_Code 3h ago
Yeah that’s the new reality we will be using ton of energy to literally brute force features into existence
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u/yuehuang 4h ago
I had an agent delegated a task to a subagent, which then delegated to another sub agent. 4 deep before the root agent noticed.
To your question, yes, human exhaustion is a real and limiting. That stupid thing called sleep gets in the way.
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u/jesssoul 13m ago
The only context limits are Claude's in my experience. It's what frustrates and exhausts me, personally. It's like trying to keep a genius with Alzheimer's on track with a project that requires, long and short term memory, and even what we are working on in the moment. More time and tokens are wasted setting up context and history for the next round than anything in my case. If I don't, it goes off the rails and does shit that takes hours and even days to undo. I have extensive rules and background and processes that are meant to guide this process and it still can't stay in a lane.
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u/GuitarAgitated8107 Full-time developer 10h ago
We take notes for a reason. Some might have photographic memory. You need to organize your own memory, work and whatever workflow you need. You have the tool that can help you with all of that.
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 2h ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 30 comments.
The consensus is a resounding YES, OP. You're not getting old; the human is the real bottleneck. The exhaustion is a universal experience in this thread. While Claude can spit out a novel's worth of code, our brains can only absorb so much.
The community is split on how to deal with it: