What Do Humans Do While the Agents Run?
Tony Wood
AI agents can do useful work, but they often take time, so people must wait and return to review the results. The best approach is to use breaks for rest, movement, or thought—not to start endless new tasks. Human judgment still matters, and switching back into focus is a key skill.
20 Oct 2026
You can line up a whole stack of agent tasks. You can keep ten things moving. You can use every pause to start another run. You can keep yourself at 100 percent for eight, ten, twelve hours, constantly switching, constantly checking, constantly loading and unloading context.
That will look productive for a while.
It may also burn people out.
Because the work is not just waiting. The work is repeated re-entry into complexity. It is picking up a thread, understanding what the agent did, making a decision, and then placing the next thread carefully.