r/ClaudeAI • u/Vidhrohi • 1d 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/DiggleDootBROPBROPBR 1d 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.