I Take My Laptop to the Gym So Claude Doesn't Have Downtime

I've tried to get Claude running on my phone during my son's soccer practice. Swimming lessons too. When I take him to the park, I kick off background agents before we leave the house because God forbid my $200/month Max subscription has idle cycles while I'm pushing a kid on a swing.

I've been using Claude Code every day for over six months. I write about Claude Code every week. I'm not new to this.

I just can't stop doing it.

Here's my activity from the last ten weeks, tracked by an open-source tool called AgentsView:

2,835 sessions in ten weeks (there is no data before that).

One session. You're focused. The output is good. You ship something real.

Then you realize you can run two in parallel. One writes the feature, the other writes the tests. Why wouldn't you?

Then three. Then five. You discover background agents - kick off work before bed, wake up to finished PRs. You start thinking about your agents the way a factory manager thinks about machines on a floor. Utilization rate. Idle time. Wasted capacity.

I started making sure I always had something queued. Session finishes, start another one. Not because I had a plan for what it should build. Because the session was available and leaving it empty felt like waste.

I am not alone. I have spoken to a lot of friends at this point who are feeling the same way. One built a Telegram bot so he could talk to Claude from his phone. Another set up a queuing system so tasks line up and fire automatically. One has Claude call them when it needs input.

Engineers building personal infrastructure to make sure they're never more than a notification away from their agents. And they're proud of it.

P.S I write about Claude Code internals every week. Last week I wrote about how Claude Code is a while loop with 23 tools. Subscribe to get the next one!

Two things happened around the same time.

First, my sleep. I use an Eight Sleep and I've always been consistent — in bed by 10, asleep by 10:30, up at 6. Then I started missing my sleep window. One night, two nights, then a whole stretch.

Green bars are nights I hit my sleep window. Gray bars are nights I didn't.

I wasn't staying up because the agents needed me. Background agents don't need babysitting. I stayed up because I wanted to see the output. One more prompt. One more check. Let me just see if this one lands.

Then the terminals. I looked at my screen one morning and had no idea what half my sessions were doing. I'd kicked off agents the night before and forgotten about them. The output from most of them was unusable - not because Claude did bad work, but because I'd asked for things I didn't actually need.

I was boiling the ocean because the marginal cost of "why not run one more session" felt like zero.

It wasn't zero.

Here's what people get wrong about this: it's not workaholism. I've always worked long hours. Every founder has. The difference is that hard problems used to force natural stopping points. You'd hit a wall, step away, come back with fresh eyes.

AI coding tools removed the wall. There's always another prompt you could run, another agent you could spin up. The stopping points are gone and nothing replaced them.

I wasn't optimizing for outcomes. I was optimizing for utilization. Those are different things.

Utilization says: every available session should be running. Outcomes says: is the thing this session produces worth the context it takes to review, merge, and maintain?

Running five sessions in parallel wasn't 5x productive. It was context overload. I had so many terminals open that I couldn't hold the state of any of them in my head. Review quality dropped. Merge conflicts multiplied. Half the code I generated, I never even read.

The ROI on most of those sessions was zero.

I run one session. Sometimes two. I resist the urge to start more.

This is harder than it sounds. You have a Max subscription. You could be running five agents right now. Running one feels like leaving money on the table. There's a voice that says you're not using the tool to its full potential. That other people are shipping faster because they're running more sessions than you.

I don't have a clean answer for this. "No-code Saturdays" sounds nice until Sunday rolls around and you're making up for lost time.

What I've found is simpler. One focused session where I know exactly what I want to build produces more usable output than five sessions where I'm spraying prompts at the wall.

I still take my laptop to the gym sometimes. But I've stopped treating my subscription like a utilization metric and started treating it like a tool I pick up when I have a specific job for it.

The heatmap is still green. Just a little less green than it used to be.