> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://madewithlove.com/blog/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Engineering is no longer a distraction-free job, deal with it - URL: https://madewithlove.com/blog/engineering-is-no-longer-a-distraction-free-job-deal-with-it/ - Published: 2026-10-26T09:31:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-26T09:31:01.000Z - Description: Running agents in parallel turned engineers into notification processors. Defending focus is a losing fight. The job now is making interruptions affordable: visible signals, no friction, finished work you can walk away from, and more valuable work within reach. - Author: Jonas Drieghe - Tags: AI Agents, AI development, Developer experience, Processes, Engineering, Ideas, #ai-fast-track A year ago, our job was built around protected focus. Today we run agents in parallel and ship at a pace that would have sounded absurd back then. We went from focused code crafters to distracted notification processors. We’ve written plenty about what that means for our industry. Hardly anyone has asked what it does to the humans in the loop. Here’s my take: *software engineering is no longer a distraction-free job, and that’s fine*. **The real question is how to make that distraction affordable.** So stop defending your focus. > **Embrace the distraction.** Being an effective engineer today isn’t so much about which harness, skills or pipeline to use. It’s all about the single-threaded brain running all of them, and how to keep it sane. ## It starts with a glass of water You know the afternoon: deep in the flow, and by five you have a headache and haven’t had a sip of water all day. Your body sent the signal. You just didn’t hear it. My brain is bad at hearing those signals (I’m one of those neuro-spicy people), so I build my own. A bottle out of sight doesn’t work for me. A full glass in front of me does: I see it, I drink it, and when it’s empty, I refill it. That glass does four things, and they carry everything that follows: - **Visible.** The important signal sits where I can’t miss it. - **No friction.** Nothing stands between noticing and acting. - **State.** It shows how things stand, so my head doesn’t have to. - **Habit.** The right action happens without a decision. ## Keep everything in sight Yesterday’s tools give yesterday’s results. Pick tools that keep [many agents side by side](https://madewithlove.com/blog/conductor-running-multiple-ai-coding-agents-in-parallel/) and show at a glance which ones are waiting on you. Then go extreme on inbox zero. Mail, chat, review requests, agent badges: every notification gets read, answered or turned into something concrete, right away. A notification that lingers turns into noise, and noise is where things get lost. > **Inbox zero. All of them, all day.** A few habits keep it that way: - **Keep every input in sight.** Mail, chat, browser and agents, all a glance away. - **Prefer a badge over a sound.** A sound fades. A badge waits until you handle it. - **Treat tabs as your to-do list.** Close each one the moment its job is done, even if that job is briefing an agent. - **Keep agents ready, not running.** An empty prompt makes starting cost nothing. - **Catch up on purpose.** After time away, work through your inboxes, tabs and agents, and let agents summarise what moved. - **Do it twice, make it a skill.** The second time is the last time you do it by hand. - **Draft first.** Your output is your teammates’ input. Don’t ask for their attention until it’s ready. ## Pebbles, not breadcrumbs Why do we sit and watch our agents work? Because we’re afraid of losing track. Remember Hansel’s breadcrumbs? The birds ate every one. Whatever you keep in your head goes the same way, eaten by the next interruption. Pebbles don’t get eaten. A pebble is a small piece of finished work you can see: a draft pull request, a sent reply, an agent session that holds the context. Walk away whenever you like, and follow the pebbles back. Finished work stops nagging at you (psychologists call it the Zeigarnik effect), so every pebble is one less thing to carry. **Closure is king: it’s what makes the interruptions affordable.** > **Don’t leave breadcrumbs. Drop pebbles.** ## Busy isn’t impact Running many agents on work that doesn’t matter is still work that doesn’t matter. Most of us don’t stall at two parallel threads because we can’t handle more. We stall because we run out of valuable things to do. An idle agent doesn’t mind waiting. An idle engineer staring at an agent is a different story. The valuable work comes from three places: - **Context.** Glance at the title of every pull request that comes in. You won’t read the diffs, but you’ll know what everyone is building. Now and then you’ll spot two people solving the same problem from different ends, or someone digging into code you know well, and one quick message saves them days. Look beyond the code too: how sales pitches the product, what customers complain about, how colleagues actually use it. Every bit of context makes the next thing you pick up more valuable. - **People.** Every company has people with more ideas than hands: a new product lead, a designer, a team stuck with a manual process. Offer to help, unblock them fast, and make your own work [easy to review](https://madewithlove.com/blog/small-commits-how-to-make-a-difference-when-reviewing-code/) with a screenshot or a short video in every pull request. Helping someone else make an impact quickly builds trust in both directions, and that trust comes back the moment you need a quick answer or the benefit of the doubt. - **Platform.** Slow queries, flaky tests, forgotten services and code nobody owns never make the roadmap, yet everyone pays for them every day. Browse your query performance insights now and then, delete what’s dead, refactor what hurts, and write down [what only you know](https://madewithlove.com/blog/eliminating-spofs-the-importance-of-documentation/). It fits perfectly in the gaps between everything else, and it makes all the other work faster. That sounds like a lot of work on top of your tickets. It used to be. Today an agent can summarise the pull requests you skimmed, capture the screenshots for your review, or dig through slow query logs whilst you’re in a meeting. The same tools that flood you with notifications make the extra glasses cheap to keep full. Together, that’s impact as a senior engineer. Most of us keep one glass in front of us: the ticket queue. > **Keep more glasses within reach.** ## Which glass is out of reach? You don’t need my setup. Look at your signals, your friction, your state, your habits and your pebbles, and ask which one hurts most today. Pick that one and try it for two weeks. And don’t fear the distraction. It’s today’s reality, and it isn’t going away. Embrace the distraction. And while you’re at it, go get yourself a glass of water.