As we prepare to enter the second half of 2026, we’ve seen a rapid shift in the meta of vibe engineering. The shape of software engineering that is coalescing today appears to rely on deploying swarms of agents with defined roles to accomplish workflows together. Swarming agents run in --yolo mode in sandboxes with an orchestration layer that enables them to communicate. The central role of the developer lies in owning the overall vision, designing or selecting the shape of a swarm of agents that best matches the problem, and then monitoring progress, reviewing when workflows reach stage gates or intervening with clarifications. A majority of my daily workflow lies in managing and addressing the needs of my agents.

Sophisticated agentic products like Blueprint and Sculptor help by refining your vision into clear instructions, and by simplifying the orchestration required to achieve your vision. However, as of the middle of 2026, we still need the attention of a developer with expert judgment and taste to deliver non-trivial software design tasks. Without that constant input, the output degrades to slop or grinds to a halt. If you, like me, have embraced the agent-swarm approach to software development, you’ve noticed that you are now more interrupt-driven.

This constant demand for attention explains the mode that I’m often in, and in which I encounter many software engineering friends and colleagues: babysitting a swarm of agents while in a state of continuous partial attention. It’s common to make a quick excuse while alt-tabbing to one’s preferred orchestration software or mobile phone app to scan for stuck agents or answer the next layer of prompting. I’ve heard developers jokingly call this “feeding time”, as in, “Hey everyone, this meeting has been running a while. Why don’t we take five minutes to feed our agents and continue after that?”

It’s clear that juggling the needs of a swarm is challenging in directions that were antithetical to the best practices of the past, where Single Target Focus was the key to productivity and success. In contrast, the calculus has now shifted in favour of timeslicing your attention across multiple agents. This is precisely because the immediate reward of each response to an agent potentially yields a large amount of progress. Not only does each interruption feel justified at the margin, but we actively invent parallel workflows that will block on us, guaranteeing we will be in a reactive mode.

Chronic CPA has been shown to cause a large heap of biological effects related to stress and attention, as this Wikipedia article describes. Additionally, while we spend all our time plucking the low-hanging fruit, we cheat ourselves out of the quiet, focused time to think, deeply reflect and make connections about the meaning of the work that we’re doing. We might miss out on noticing what’s absent or even truly wrong, because we feel so productive doing what’s right in front of us.

Travellers who are lost in a featureless landscape without any externally visible point to orient themselves are known to wander in circles despite their best efforts. This is because their internal imbalances inevitably lead to a drift in alignment. Without an external point of reference to correct against that drift, they have no hope of achieving a true heading.

Making time for quiet reflection is how you align yourself against that external bearing. It is how you focus the combined might of your intelligent workflows, cutting-edge models and agentic swarms on the right problems. It’s the way you identify and correct for any systematic imbalances you might fail to otherwise notice bustle of your work.

The tenor of the current conversation around agentic development spotlights speed, deservedly, since the gains there have been phenomenal. However, without taking the time to quietly unplug and reflect, that same speed threatens to trap us in ever-accelerating, ever-tightening circles.

The intended audience of this article is myself, because I really need to hear this. But I’m sharing it more widely in case it helps anyone else. If you’re willing to try it out, I encourage you to take concrete steps to make the quiet time to think. Here’s what I’ve come up with as a starting point for this week:

• Block out recurring time on your calendar, towards the end of the day.
• Agents can be running at this time (in fact, I’ll ensure they’ve just been fed), but they cannot be responded to.
• Spend this time in reflection on the progress of the day. I’m choosing writing as a medium, and specifically pen + paper to make it harder to alt-tab back to my orchestration tools.

I’ll check in again in a few weeks with an update on how this goes. I’m trying to keep my expectations measured, and I don’t expect this practice alone to bring me life-changing results. All I’m looking to do is to put aside some time for that deep reflection.

A time for insights to emerge. A time of quiet in the zoo.