Human bandwidth and context switching definitely seems to be a major bottleneck at the moment, but if scheduling several tasks concurrently to batch questions I imagine there is an upper limit on how many tasks can be run in parallel, especially if there are dependencies between them. I think we need to start charging employers per token of human attention if you optimise the mental throughput. I'm going to miss doomscrolling while claude writes the plan though :(
There are some great ideas in this post, namely the focus on human attention as the limited resource and the recursive decomposition of tasks. There were also a few points which I found unclear. You describe recursive decomposition as a "tree of DAGs ...". What do you mean by this? Is each node in the tree a DAG? Secondly, I agree that the tree is exponentially faster than one agent scanning a flat list, but are you not running exponentially more "scanning" agents? If human attention is the only limiting factor this is fine, but is this not a problem if you have limited compute?
Human bandwidth and context switching definitely seems to be a major bottleneck at the moment, but if scheduling several tasks concurrently to batch questions I imagine there is an upper limit on how many tasks can be run in parallel, especially if there are dependencies between them. I think we need to start charging employers per token of human attention if you optimise the mental throughput. I'm going to miss doomscrolling while claude writes the plan though :(
There are some great ideas in this post, namely the focus on human attention as the limited resource and the recursive decomposition of tasks. There were also a few points which I found unclear. You describe recursive decomposition as a "tree of DAGs ...". What do you mean by this? Is each node in the tree a DAG? Secondly, I agree that the tree is exponentially faster than one agent scanning a flat list, but are you not running exponentially more "scanning" agents? If human attention is the only limiting factor this is fine, but is this not a problem if you have limited compute?
this sounds so expensive, is this latency win worth picking worse models to make it affordable?