Why does working with AI leave me exhausted?
Why working with AI can wear you out.
You've got three agents going. One's drafting a report, one's fixing a spreadsheet, one's researching a supplier.
You flick between them: approve this, check that, re-prompt the other one. Everything is moving.
By 11am your brain feels like you've worked a full day.
Two researchers at Berkeley's business school, Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye, followed 200 employees at a US tech company from April to December 2025.
People took on more at once because they felt they had a partner to help. But they found:
the reality was a continual switching of attention, frequent checking of AI outputs, and a growing number of open tasks.
Context switching: moving your attention from one task to another. Each switch costs a little time and focus while you remember where you were.
It's like being interrupted mid-sentence. Getting back on track only takes a few seconds, but do that forty times an hour and it adds up.
Every agent you run in parallel is another thing that can interrupt you.
Simon Willison, writing about his own work:
I can get so much done, but after just an hour or two my mental energy for the day feels almost entirely depleted.
He also mentions people losing sleep because building "yet another feature with 'just one more prompt'" is so hard to resist.
Programmer Steve Yegge calls this "the AI vampire".
His argument: if you work eight hours a day at ten times the speed, your employer gets all of the extra value. You get exhausted. He suggests that around four hours a day of agent work is a more realistic pace.
Mario Zechner, who builds agent software himself, points out that a human is a natural brake. One person can only make so many mistakes in a day.
With a crowd of agents there's no brake:
These tiny little harmless booboos suddenly compound at a rate that's unsustainable.
You only notice when it's already a mess (see "Cognitive debt: when AI does the thinking for you").
Run fewer things at once. One or two agents you can actually follow beat five you can't.
Review in batches. Check in every 20 minutes instead of jumping on every ping.
Only let it make as much as you can review. If you can't read it all today, it's too much for today.
Set a stop time. Watch out for "just one more prompt" at 11pm.