Treating AI coding tools like an asynchronous junior engineer, rather than a synchronous pair programmer, sets correct expectations. This allows users to delegate tasks, go to meetings, and check in later, enabling true multi-threading of work without the need to babysit the tool.

The most significant productivity gains come from applying AI to every stage of development, including research, planning, product marketing, and status updates. Limiting AI to just code generation misses the larger opportunity to automate the entire engineering process.

Cognition's CEO highlights five ideal, immediately delegable tasks for AI coding assistants: miscellaneous front-end fixes, version upgrades and migrations, documentation generation, initial incident response, and writing unit tests for existing code.

Tools like Git were designed for human-paced development. AI agents, which can make thousands of changes in parallel, require a new infrastructure layer—real-time repositories, coordination mechanisms, and shared memory—that traditional systems cannot support.

Because AI agents operate autonomously, developers can now code collaboratively while on calls. They can brainstorm, kick off a feature build, and have it ready for production by the end of the meeting, transforming coding from a solo, heads-down activity to a social one.

Codex lacks a built-in feature for parallel sub-agents like Claude Code. The workaround is to instruct the main Codex instance to write a script that launches multiple, separate terminal sessions of itself. Each session handles a sub-task in parallel, and the main instance aggregates the results.

The agent development process can be significantly sped up by running multiple tasks concurrently. While one agent is engineering a prompt, other processes can be simultaneously scraping websites for a RAG database and conducting deep research on separate platforms. This parallel workflow is key to building complex systems quickly.

Instead of relying on a single, all-purpose coding agent, the most effective workflow involves using different agents for their specific strengths. For example, using the 'Friday' agent for UI tasks, 'Charlie' for code reviews, and 'Claude Code' for research and backend logic.

The ideal AI-powered engineering workflow isn't just one tool, but a fluid cycle. It involves synchronous collaboration with an AI for planning and review, then handing off to an asynchronous agent for implementation and testing, before returning to synchronous mode for the next phase.