Since February 2025, when Andrej Karpathy coined the term “vibe code”, I’ve been experimenting with this new way of building software: the idea is simple: you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists - you prompt, you wait, you accept and somehow things work out - sounds amazing right? I even built a fully production-ready Rust service, github.com/saynaai/sayna, with this concept using Claude Code and Codex. github.com/saynaai/sayna, BUT here is the thing that nobody is talking about: what do you do while the AI is coding for you? The hidden problem of waiting If you are using Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or any other agentic coding tool, you know the drill: you write a prompt, hit enter and then wait - sometimes it’s 30 seconds, sometimes it’s 5 minutes for more complex tasks - and during that time your brain is just sitting there looking at terminal logs scrolling on. So naturally you switch to something else: check your email, open Twitter, scroll through Slack messages, maybe watch a YouTube video. And then the agent concludes, you get a notification and switch back in. This is the exact moment where everything goes wrong. This is the exact moment where everything goes wrong. I’ve been doing this for months, and I’ve noticed something disturbing about my own behavior: Each time I switch to social media or email while waiting for an agent to finish, I’m not just killing time, I’m actively destroying my ability to focus on the actual work. Research shows that it takes about 25 minutes to refocus your brain after a context change. If you switch a new task 4 times in a workday, that is 2 extra hours wasted to get the brain back to where it was… and with vibe programming, you could be switching 10-20 times per hour! The Dopamine Trap Here’s what actually happens in your brain: every time you check Twitter or email, you get a small dopamine hit. Your brain loves that. It’s the same reward mechanism that keeps you scrolling endlessly on social media. Combine that with vibe coding workflow now: Write a prompt (small cognitive effort)
Wait for the agent to finish (boring brain seeks stimulation)
Check Social Media (dopamine hit!)
Agent finishes, switch back (context switch cost)
Review code, write new prompt
Repeat Write a prompt (small cognitive effort) Wait for the agent to finish (boring brain seeks stimulation) Check Social Media (dopamine hit!) Agent finishes, switch back (context switch cost) Review code, write new prompt Repeat In essence, you train your brain to expect constant Dopamine rewards between small bursts of actual thinking, which over time destroys your attention span. I observed that I could no longer sit and focus on a complex problem for more than 15-20 minutes without feeling the urge to check something out. Dopamine The irony is that vibe programming was supposed to make us more productive, BUT that is the way most of us use it: we are less capable of doing deep work, trading long-term cognitive ability for short-term convenience. My solution: Batch Everything After realizing this problem I changed completely how I work with AI agents: Instead of the prompt-wait-distract-repeat cycle, I now do something I call “batch prompting”. “batch prompting” Here’s my new workflow. Phase 1: Planning (2-3 hours) Phase 1: Planning (2-3 hours) I spend focused time writing detailed task descriptions for multiple agents. No distractions. No checking emails. Just pure thinking and writing. I might prepare 5-10 different tasks that need to be done. This phase requires actual cognitive effort; you have to think about architecture, break down problems, write clear specifications. It’s no more vibe coding, it’s actually software engineering with the understanding that agents will do the implementation. Phase 2: Launch (5 minutes) Phase 2: Launch (5 minutes) All the agents at once I get: Multiple terminal windows with Claude code running on different worktrees. Different Codex instances working on different features. Everything starts in parallel. Phase 3: Disappear (30-60 minutes) Phase 3: Disappear (30-60 minutes) This is the key part. I leave, I go for a walk, I do a jog, I take a coffee break without my phone. Sometimes I just sit and think about other problems. The point is that I am NOT sitting at my computer waiting and getting tempted to check social media. All agents are working in parallel so the wait time is shorter anyways, it might take 30-40 minutes for all of them to finish their tasks. NOT Phase 4: Review (1-2 hours) Phase 4: Review (1-2 hours) When I come back, I have multiple completed tasks to review: I go through each one, check the code, run tests, merge what works, this is focused work again without interruptions. Why this works The batch approach works for several reasons: No context switching while waiting. Because I am not at the computer, I can’t switch to distractions, my brain gets real rest instead of junk food dopamine. No context switching while waiting. Parallel execution saves time. If you are running 5 agents that each take 10 minutes, running them in parallel takes 10 minutes total, not 50 minutes sequentially - so you are actually more efficient. Parallel execution saves time. Deep work is protected. The planning and review phases are genuine focus time: No agents running, no notifications, just thinking and coding Deep work is protected. Physical movement helps cognition. Walking or exercising while agents work is actually beneficial for your brain studies show that physical activity improves cognitive function and creativity. Physical movement helps cognition. The bigger picture I think the vibe coding community is missing something important: everyone talks about how to write better prompts, which tools to use, how to integrate with different IDEs, but almost nobody talks about the cognitive cost of this new workflow. Researchers call this phenomenon “attention residue”. When you switch tasks, part of your brain stays stuck with the previous task. With constant micro-switching between prompting and social media, you are accumulating massive attention residue that makes you perform worse on everything. Some people already build tools to address this - there’s Vibe-Kanban which lets you run agents in parallel and manage them through a board interface - others use git worktrees to isolate different agent workspaces - these are good technical solutions, BUT the real solution is behavioral - Vibe-Kanban You have to decide consciously that the time between prompts is not “free time” that should be filled with stimulation, it’s either focused work time or genuine rest time, nothing in between. Practical Tips If you want to try the batch approach, here are some things that helped me: use git worktrees. This lets you run multiple agents on the same repo without them stepping on each other: each agent gets its own branch and working directory. use git worktrees. Write tasks first as documents. Before prompting, write what you want in a markdown file. This forces you to think clearly and also gives you something to refer to later on. Write tasks first as documents. Set a physical boundary. When agents are running, physically move away from your computer. Go to a different room, go outside - anything that creates distance. Set a physical boundary. Kill notifications. Turn off all social media and email notifications on your phone if you are going to walk while agents work - don’t want your phone buzzing with Twitter - notifications. Kill notifications. Track your focus time. I started tracking how much uninterrupted focus time I get each day. It was embarrassing at first, but it motivated me to improve. Track your focus time. Conclusion Vibe coding is powerful, being able to describe what you want in natural language and have AI implement it is genuinely transformative for software development, but like any powerful tool it comes with risks. The risk here is not in the technology itself, but in how we adapt our behavior around it. If we use the waiting time to doom scroll, we are swapping our cognitive abilities for short-term entertainment. This will make us worse at the things that actually matter: thinking clearly, solving complex problems and building great software. The solution is to be intentional about how you structure your work: Batch your prompts, run agents in parallel and use the waiting time for genuine rest or physical activity. Your brain will thank you. And if you are building tools in the AI agent space, think about this problem: How can we design workflows that protect human attention instead of fragmenting it? I think there’s a big opportunity here. If you have found your own ways to deal with the attention span problem with vibe coding, I would love to hear about it. Drop me a message or share your experience.

This story contains AI-generated text. The author has used AI either for research, to generate outlines, or write the text itself. 

Multitasking with Vibe Coding drains your attention span | Tigran.tech

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