--- schema: 1 type: video title: 'Your Attention Is the Bottleneck, Not Your Agents — Zack Proser, WorkOS' 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: - https://linkedin.com/in/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 --- Watch along with the corrected transcript, summary, timestamps and resources on this talk's official AIE page: https://ai.engineer/talks/so9l_MwS2yg-your-attention-is-the-bottleneck-not-your-agents-zack-proser-workos Join our upcoming AI Engineer conferences (see https://ai.engineer landing page): - AIEi Shanghai, November 5–6 — the first for meeting top Chinese labs and engineers - AIE CODE in SF, November 10–12 — the top AI Coding conference returns - AIEi Sydney, December 7–8 — the first AIEi run alongside NeurIPS 2026 in Sydney --- canonical: >- https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer/explore/video/your-attention-is-the-bottleneck-not-your-agents-za-ee7fb69b66f5 markdown: >- https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer/video/your-attention-is-the-bottleneck-not-your-agents-za-ee7fb69b66f5.md llms: null parent: 'https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer.md' channel: aidotengineer updated: '2026-10-24T09:33:48.257Z' language: null children: [] videoId: so9l_MwS2yg durationSeconds: 1517 publishedAt: '2026-06-11T14:00:06.000Z' searchChunks: - ordinal: 0 text: null startSeconds: 25 endSeconds: 69 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/so9l_MwS2yg?t=25' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 1 text: null startSeconds: 81 endSeconds: 226 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/so9l_MwS2yg?t=81' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 2 text: null startSeconds: 226 endSeconds: 237 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/so9l_MwS2yg?t=226' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 3 text: null startSeconds: 315 endSeconds: 326 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/so9l_MwS2yg?t=315' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 4 text: null startSeconds: 369 endSeconds: 380 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/so9l_MwS2yg?t=369' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 5 text: null startSeconds: 434 endSeconds: 446 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/so9l_MwS2yg?t=434' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 6 text: null startSeconds: 500 endSeconds: 510 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/so9l_MwS2yg?t=500' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 7 text: null startSeconds: 510 endSeconds: 678 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/so9l_MwS2yg?t=510' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 8 text: null startSeconds: 678 endSeconds: 688 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/so9l_MwS2yg?t=678' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 9 text: null startSeconds: 732 endSeconds: 744 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/so9l_MwS2yg?t=732' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 10 text: null startSeconds: 811 endSeconds: 822 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/so9l_MwS2yg?t=811' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 11 text: null startSeconds: 822 endSeconds: 938 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/so9l_MwS2yg?t=822' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 12 text: null startSeconds: 938 endSeconds: 948 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/so9l_MwS2yg?t=938' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 13 text: null startSeconds: 1074 endSeconds: 1210 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/so9l_MwS2yg?t=1074' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 14 text: null startSeconds: 1210 endSeconds: 1220 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/so9l_MwS2yg?t=1210' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 15 text: null startSeconds: 1295 endSeconds: 1305 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/so9l_MwS2yg?t=1295' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 16 text: null startSeconds: 1337 endSeconds: 1347 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/so9l_MwS2yg?t=1337' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 17 text: null startSeconds: 1427 endSeconds: 1438 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/so9l_MwS2yg?t=1427' heldReason: rights --- # Your Attention Is the Bottleneck, Not Your Agents — Zack Proser, WorkOS 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: - https://linkedin.com/in/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 --- Watch along with the corrected transcript, summary, timestamps and resources on this talk's official AIE page: https://ai.engineer/talks/so9l_MwS2yg-your-attention-is-the-bottleneck-not-your-agents-zack-proser-workos Join our upcoming AI Engineer conferences (see https://ai.engineer landing page): - AIEi Shanghai, November 5–6 — the first for meeting top Chinese labs and engineers - AIE CODE in SF, November 10–12 — the top AI Coding conference returns - AIEi Sydney, December 7–8 — the first AIEi run alongside NeurIPS 2026 in Sydney --- Canonical: https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer/explore/video/your-attention-is-the-bottleneck-not-your-agents-za-ee7fb69b66f5 · Channel: [AI Engineer](https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer.md) > Search chunk text is held until public-source provenance is verified. ## Document chunks > Missing: no stored document chunks are available.