Where the Automation Has to Stop | Yusuf Aytas

I keep seeing people running multiple agents, perfect setups with multiple skills, operating a fleet of assignments. First of all, this looks like science fiction. Besides that, I can hardly get my head around it. I use all the tools, Gemini, Claude, and Codex, and I simply don’t see how I can use several of these at once. My problem is my own cognitive limitation. I can only do so much. I wonder how these people are able to run so many tasks. Is this real? Am I simply older?

I asked around. Looks like I’m not the only one. So I’m not an outlier. I wanted to dig deeper into this whole productivity trap, because we feel like we are behind and maybe we are not. Cognitive debt is what people have started calling it, and it makes sense. You can only produce so much before you stop remembering what you did.

There was already a question around where to draw the line with AI at work, but this feels slightly different. The tool is no longer only helping with the work. It can create more work than one person can hold in their head.

If you did things the old way, there was a limiting factor. Coding, designing, whatever, you had to type, think, type again. I’m writing this and thinking at the same time. It doesn’t all come together at once. The slow part was also where you understood what you were doing. You wrote something, saw it fail, changed it, and kept the whole thing somewhere in your head. AI removes some of that process, but not the need to understand the result. It just leaves that part until later.

AI makes us feel like we should go fast, but we can only do so much. That brings me to a few problems.

Agent Takeover

Several Unfinished Things

Coming back to where I started, multiple agents, organizations with agents and humans. Who understands this, though? Which companies can realistically do this? I can do it for my toy projects where I don’t have a fucking clue what’s going on, even though I actually read the code. How can someone run many agents and deploy all of this into production?

Running multiple agents does not really mean you are doing multiple things at once. It means you have several unfinished things waiting for you. You go from one to another, try to remember what it was doing, review something, answer a question, then go back to the first one and try to remember that again. Maybe some people are very good at this. I am not sure humans can scale it indefinitely.

The cognitive load used to come from noise around the work: notifications, meetings, messy systems, and hundreds of small decisions. Now the work itself becomes the interruption. Every agent returns with another decision that needs attention.

That is where the documentation argument starts to fall apart. Yes, we were bad at documenting before, and things went stale. But there was usually still someone who had followed the change closely enough to explain it. If the code is generated, reviewed, and accepted before anyone builds that understanding, a document written afterwards will not magically create it. You keep accepting, accepting, accepting, and eventually nobody has a clue what is happening.

You may finish more work and understand less at the end of the day. That feels fine while everything works. It becomes a different problem six months later when something breaks and someone has to reconstruct the whole thing.

The person whose name is on the PR will still be responsible. Nobody will accept “Claude did it” in a postmortem. But that person may have only prompted it, skimmed the change, asked another model to review it, and approved it. Responsibility stays exactly where it was while the actual involvement gets smaller.

Code became cheaper, but ownership did not. The newer problem is what ownership means when one person is nominally responsible for several streams of work they did not really follow. The code has an owner in Git, but the decision behind it may not really have one.

The Team Did Not Get Bigger

I like The Matrix. In fact, that is probably one of the reasons I ended up in this business, funny enough. Agents are coming, and it feels real now. However, Neo never collaborated with Agent Smith. Somehow, we are expected to. I run my agent and you run yours. How do we share them? Even if we do, how do we make sure we understand the same thing?

The work was never only about tools, at least for me. When people work together, someone pushes back, someone remembers an old incident, someone explains why a bizarre part exists. Slowly, the team builds a shared picture.

Agents move a lot of that into private sessions. I ask mine twenty questions, reject a few ideas, change direction, and eventually send you a PR. You see the output, maybe a summary, but not the path that got there.

Sharing the transcript does not really solve it either. You can read the same conversation and still come away with a different understanding. Shared context is not just a document. It is...