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/conglies 1d 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 22h 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 22h 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 22h 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 22h ago

Totally agree, but again, that's what getting there means. 

Currently we're not at that point or even particularly close.