How I Run Three AI Models in Parallel Without Losing My Mind

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There’s a video game called Overcooked that feels a lot like my workday with AI. You play line cooks in a chaotic kitchen, sprinting between stations while orders pile up and the clock ticks down. One player chops onions, another stirs soup, a third dashes to the sink for clean dishes—all while the printer keeps spitting out new tickets. Just thinking about it makes my heart rate spike.

It’s also how I feel managing multiple models.

At one “station” I've got GPT-5 pulling sources for an essay. At another, I'm having Claude review a draft. Meanwhile, research for a new AI editorial workflow simmers like a stew in a crockpot, and I'm also updating our Source Code style guide with some insights from the latest published piece. AI makes this particular brand of controlled chaos possible. And for that, I'm grateful—and a little overwhelmed.

I've always hopped between projects when I get stuck. But AI changes the tempo. The model pushes one task forward while I'm setting up the next. My job now: choosing what gets attention right now and deciding what "done" means for this pass.

In other words, I’m a manager, but instead of junior humans, my direct reports are LLMs. This is the allocation economy, where value comes from deploying attention strategically across multiple processes rather than diving deep into one. The old paradigm assumed you were either building or coordinating—never both at once. AI breaks that assumption.

It also turns the volume up on a problem seasoned multitaskers know only too well. Every model handoff is a context reset, and those resets come with a cost. Master the pivots and you multiply your output. Miss them and you drop plates. Here's what I've learned about the boundaries that separate chaotic productivity from plain-old chaos.

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Makers versus managers versus model managers

In 2009, Paul Graham published an essay called "Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule." In it, he argues that makers and managers need fundamentally different calendars. Makers (programmers, writers, designers) need long, uninterrupted blocks of time to build momentum and enter flow state. Managers operate in hourlong chunks, their days pre-fragmented by meetings. When these two schedules collide, makers lose—a single meeting can shatter an entire day's productivity.

For 15 years, we treated Graham's divide as gospel: Protect the makers, and let the managers coordinate. Companies built entire cultures around this—no-meeting Wednesdays, focus-time blocks, elaborate systems to guard deep work from the tyranny of the calendar.

But model management scrambles these neat categories...

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