Ido Salomon, Founder of AgentCraft: The More Agents, the More Humans Become the Bottleneck for Oversight — Control Paradigms from Real-Time Strategy Games Can Be Migrated
At the AI Engineer conference, Ido Salomon argued that while coding agents are now powerful enough, managing multiple agents simultaneously makes human attention the bottleneck. His solution is to borrow control mechanisms from real-time strategy games—maps, units, heat maps, and keyboard shortcuts—to shift the oversight burden from constant monitoring to manageable spatial information.
Coding agents can already produce anything from cat memes to B2B SaaS applications. At the 2026 AI Engineer conference, Ido Salomon, founder of AgentCraft, creator of MCP-UI, and co-maintainer of MCP Apps, posed a counterintuitive question: If agents are so capable, why doesn't everyone have an army of them? His diagnosis is that the bottleneck lies not in model capabilities, but in humans. Each additional agent launched adds demands for guidance, direction, and review, all falling on the same person's attention until the act of supervision itself becomes exhausting.
Salomon argues that the skills needed to solve this bottleneck already exist. He draws an analogy to real-time strategy games: in titles like Warcraft or The Sims, players control multiple units simultaneously not by checking every frame of action, but through spatialized state awareness, rapid jumping to items requiring attention, and the ability to delegate tasks to sub-units. AgentCraft brings this control language into coding agent workflows—agents appear as units on a map, the file system is projected as terrain, heat maps show which directories are active, and pressing the spacebar jumps to the most recent item needing human attention.
Building on this foundation, Salomon described three progressive layers: visibility lets users know who is doing what; autonomy reduces continuous supervision through task delegation (agents scan the codebase and suggest next steps, which users accept with a click) and orchestrators (users provide broad goals, which the orchestrator breaks down and executes in local containers); and review toolkits package completed changes into file lists plus visual evidence (screenshots or screen recordings), allowing users to quickly judge whether to accept them, or even run multiple instances in parallel to select the best implementation. Finally, shared rooms allow designers and engineers to advance different parts of the same project simultaneously without waiting for the other to stop.