More agent capacity can create more review work

Engineering leader Orestis Ioannou describes how coding agents expanded the work he could start while adding plans, questions and diffs that still needed his attention. Tasks that once seemed too expensive became tempting to attempt. His account highlights a daily constraint: generating more parallel work can increase the amount a person must understand and review.

Orestis Ioannou · Oct 27, 2026

Why it matters

Review capacity and attention belong in the plan when deciding how many agent tasks to run.

More context

The author compares his own experience with contribution history, while acknowledging that commits, issues and reviews do not measure delivered value. Changing roles and missing historical activity complicate comparisons. The article is a personal account of workload expansion, rather than a controlled productivity study.

Keep in mind

One practitioner’s experience cannot establish how agents affect everyone’s working hours. The author does not claim to have solved the attention problem.

Original read