The focused multitasker: how AI is rewiring the way engineers think
Here is a contradiction I keep running into. Every piece of cognitive science research I have read says the same thing: focus on one task at a time. Multitasking is a myth. Your brain cannot do two demanding things simultaneously without paying a steep performance penalty.
And yet, every day I find myself reviewing a pull request that GitHub Copilot cloud agent opened, while a CI/CD pipeline runs on a second branch triggered by AI-generated code. More parallel workstreams than I ever managed before AI entered my workflow and somehow it feels less chaotic than before.
Something does not add up. Either the science is wrong, or what I am doing is not actually multitasking. I think it is the latter, and the distinction matters for every engineer adapting to agentic workflows.