Managing agents is a context-switching skill

Working with agents creates a granular fragmentation of work. Each agent carries a small stream forward, but I still carry the map of all of them.

Cycling agent tabs in Claude Code or Codex requires rapid context switching: remembering what each agent is doing, what changed, which decision is waiting on me, and where to return next. The work includes directing agents and mentally tracking multiple concurrent streams without dropping one.

That’s a very particular skill set. It’s trainable, but it isn’t intuitive.