“In practice, most people could comfortably manage three to five sessions at a time before context switching became painful. Beyond that, productivity dropped.”

— Alex Kotliarskyi, Victor Zhu and Zach Brock, OpenAI · The ceiling of interactive coding agents

Quote · openai.com

From “An open-source spec for Codex orchestration: Symphony”, found 2026-10-14.

Take

The human is the first concurrency limit. Symphony's answer was to move scheduling into the issue tracker instead of adding more sessions.