Don't watch AI work

Since the beginning of 2026 I've been reading lots of tips about how to increase your productivity when using Claude Code and other agentic coding assistants: skills, hooks, parallel sessions etc - great ideas all around. Here's one very cheap and simple piece of advice that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere: Don't watch your AI work.

This isn't a completely obvious principle. I've probably spent a significant amount of time watching agents code or think about math for me, and I can't say it was all a waste of time. You do learn useful things about how agents think and work. So it may actually be reasonable to spend a bit of time watching your AI do things, at least in the initial phase of getting into agentic coding.

But how much you can learn from watching AI work is bounded. What isn't bounded - or if there is an upper bound to it, I haven't reached it yet - is the sheer fun of watching AI do the work that you asked for while you sit back and stare at the screen with a satisfied grin. And because it's so much fun, it's tempting to just enjoy the show. The downside is that watching AI work on one thing is time you could potentially have spent asking AI to do something else. Here we come back to the often cited recommendation to have several Claude Code (or Codex or Cursor etc) coding sessions running in parallel. My advice is congruous with the advice to have parallel sessions open, but complements it with the idea that you want to actually make good use of those sessions. To do that, you need to consciously resolve to Not Watch AI Work. At least I had to: the temptation to watch my AIs work was, and remains, quite strong for me.

Occasionally I still do it. Well, no one's perfect.