What costs you more: wrong-element guesses or sub-agent drift?
by•
Two ways my coding agent wastes my time.
One: I paste a screenshot and it edits the wrong element on a busy screen.
Two: it spins up sub-agents that wander off the task. Lately the wrong-element guess is the quieter, more frequent tax for me, but a few people swear the sub-agent drift is worse. Which one eats more of your day?
36 views
Replies
WebCurate.co
For me wrong-element guesses cost more.
Sub-agent drift is annoying but at least you notice it early. wrong element thing is worse cause you only catch it after it already did the job wrong :)
Feels like silent time waste.
SlimSnap
@hosseinyazdi "Silent time waste" nails it. Sub-agent drift at least announces itself, you watch it spiral. The wrong-element one has no error signal. It does the job confidently wrong and you only find out when you go to use it. No alarm, so the cost just hides in your day. That's the one I wanted to kill first.
wrong-element wins on volume. sub-agent drift wins on shock value. wrong-element costs you 5 minutes 20 times a week and you barely notice. sub-agent drift costs you an hour once and you spend the rest of the day questioning every prompt you ever wrote.
both compound to the same place though. you stop trusting the agent, then you start hand-verifying everything, which is the exact thing the agent was supposed to save you from.
SlimSnap
@thenameisarian sharpest framing i've seen on this. the "stop trusting, then hand-verify everything" loop is the real cost, not the minutes. and wrong-element is the more dangerous half precisely because it's quiet, you don't log it as a failure, so trust just erodes with no clear cause. the difference is that half is cheap to fix: point at the exact element instead of letting it guess, and you take one whole source of distrust off the table. sub-agent drift is the harder one, no clean fix yet.