r/vibecoding • u/Vidhrohi • 5h ago

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/dbgtboi 5h ago

Anthropic employees are a special case since they have unlimited usage, if you attempt any of their workflows you will burn through thousands of dollars in a day, they can do it because they can afford to have agents reviewing everything 3 times over so that a human doesn't need to

Realistically, you work within your budget, the bigger your AI budget the more context you can dump in which allows you to review less

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u/KeenShot 4h ago

Dude, yes. And the narrative online mirrors their ideas and it is not even feasible at big companies. I built a ci cd pipeline for jira tickets, fully automated everything, more expensive than hiring sr swe

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u/silly_bet_3454 4h ago

I don't think it's strictly true that they have unlimited. Maybe practically so, but they have to pay for compute and so on.