this post is partially joking and mostly thought-provoking about balancing agentic development workflows
The concept of the “996” work week is all the rage, but I’m thinking that the exact opposite might be optimal for both developers and companies that are heavily leveraging agentic development. (Something like Stage 7 or 8 of Steve Yegge’s blog about his gas town project.) Developers who are leveraging long-running agents don’t really benefit from long, contiguous blocks of work where they might spend a chunk of time waiting on an agent.
I’ll call this the “3x10” - ten three hour blocks of work throughout a week. This could let teams balance their AI usage tailored for agentic workflows, and give a better work-life balance. It might be stupid, I’m not sure.
I’d be kinda interested in a schedule like:
- 9am-noon: First shift
- noon-8pm: Spend time with family and living life
- 8pm-11pm: Second shift
- 11:30pm: Sleep
Where each of those two “shifts” would revolve around managing agents - reviewing the output of the previous shift’s agents, planning adjustments, normal overhead, then kicking off a new round of agents. The staggered usage time could allow more distributed usage of GPUs (or cheaper cloud costs during off hours). You could even imagine teammates alternating shifts so that they can nudge each other’s agents if they get blocked or stuck.
Devs get a better work/life balance. Companies can optimize compute costs. Maybe possible? Probably not though.