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Your Attention Is the Bottleneck, Not Your Agents — Zack Proser, WorkOS
Takeaway
Design agent workflows around sustainable human attention, with complete verification loops and filtered demands on your time.
Summary
- Proser describes giving Claude Code Slack access so it could fix a blogging bot's acronym capitalization bug and verify the result through the actual workflow.
- More autonomous agent throughput can intensify human context switching and exhaustion, making attention a practical scaling limit.
- An agent can filter Slack mentions and messages, reconcile them with Linear tickets, and surface high-priority work without constant manual browsing.
- Voice input, remote control, and analysis of stored work history are presented as ways to reduce interaction effort and improve personal workflows.
developer-productivityattention-managementvoice-workflows
Original description
Simon Willison fires up four parallel agents and is wiped out by 11am. That is the problem Zack Proser is solving: not that the tools are too slow but that human attention is still the hard constraint. His loop: voice brief at 184 words per minute, agent dispatched to an isolated git worktree, laptop closed, progress checked from a phone on LTE miles away via remote control. The talk covers four layers that make this sustainable: signal agents that read Slack and Linear on a loop so you never open them yourself, verification gates from lint and build up to browser click through and critic passes, a weekly agent run over your JSONL conversation history to surface inefficiencies and generate missing skills, and an Oura ring connected via MCP so Claude can tell you that you did not sleep last night. You can ignore it. But at least you thought about it. Speaker info: / zackproser https://github.com/zackproser Timestamps: 0:00 Introduction and the problem of AI developer burnout 1:08 A concrete example of using AI agents for bug fixing 3:36 The bottleneck: human attention vs. infinite agent scalability 5:13 The proposed stack for sustainable AI development 6:03 The Signal Layer: Managing notifications and context switching 7:04 Voice-first flows for coding efficiency 8:15 The Shower Principle and Remote Control for agents 11:13 Safety, verification, and testing gates 12:05 The new, balanced developer workflow 13:22 System self-improvement using conversation history 15:31 Holistic well-being (Oura ring integration) 17:35 Q&A: Addressing skill development early in a career 20:07 Q&A: Managing JSONL history and long-term conversation logs 21:30 Q&A: Night shift/background agent execution 22:17 Q&A: Voice interaction and audio feedback 23:39 Q&A: Handling complex, multi-stack features