America Is Headed Toward the Infinite Workweek - The Atlantic

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Last year, Steve Yegge started “suddenly getting pounded by nap attacks in the middle of the day.” Without fail, Yegge—a programmer and tech blogger—would “hit a wall, fall over, and sleep for 90 minutes,” he told me. Like many developers, Yegge no longer writes code by hand; instead, he manages a legion of bots to do that for him. His productivity has skyrocketed, but so too has his exhaustion. “I’ve fallen asleep slower at the anesthesiologist,” he recently wrote on his blog.

In theory, handing tasks off to coding agents should free up time, allowing larger blocks for deep work and rest. But some developers are having the opposite experience. Instead of allowing for greater focus, the latest AI tools are overwhelming workers, frazzling minds and shredding attention spans. Although agents can do plenty more work now than they could a year ago, they still need human oversight. Like toddlers, AI agents ask endless follow-up questions, require detailed instructions—and, if you leave them unsupervised, are liable to make a huge mess. Once you get several running simultaneously, there’s no time for breaks. As Yegge puts it on LinkedIn, his job is to be an “AI babysitter.”<br>Read: AI agents are taking America by storm<br>Plenty of people are seemingly starting to feel like depleted AI babysitters. When Boston Consulting Group recently surveyed roughly 1,500 workers across several roles at major American companies, the firm found that many workers were experiencing “mental fatigue from excessive use or oversight of AI tools beyond one’s cognitive capacity.” Respondents described a “buzzing” and “fog”-like feeling, sometimes accompanied by headaches, slower decision making, and trouble focusing. One engineering manager told the researchers that managing multiple bots at once was like having “a dozen browser tabs open in my head, all fighting for attention.” In the survey, 18 percent of developers reported AI-induced exhaustion. But in other roles, too, such as HR and marketing, where AI is also taking over, rates of reported fatigue were even higher.

In my own experiments with AI agents, I’ve experienced some of this brain fog myself. To get in the mindset of an overstimulated developer while working on this story, I asked Claude Code to deploy a team of agents to supplement my research. I already had done my reporting, but I figured the bot might be able to surface more information. Claude Code spun up a team of 17 researchers. It assigned eight agents to research different subtopics, another eight to serve as fact-checkers, and a final agent to synthesize the group’s findings into a memo.

The bot promised that the research would be easy. “Nothing for you to do,” it wrote. “Sit tight.” But the agents were needy from the start. Almost immediately, Claude Code began asking for all kinds of permissions to take actions on my behalf. Because I didn’t understand some of its questions, I started going down different rabbit holes trying to make sense of its requests. I could feel my shoulders tensing. Even once my research swarm finally got going, I kept checking in on the bots to make sure that they were on the right track. The fog was setting in. In the end, the memo that my 17 agents produced wasn’t very good, but neither was the paragraph I’d spent that time writing, because I’d been distracted by my omnipresent agent blob the entire time. (In line with The Atlantic’s policies on AI use, I didn’t use the tools to do any actual writing.)

This all felt like multitasking on steroids. In my quest to maximize my own productivity, I was wasting time and producing lower-quality work. As the BCG team found, “juggling and multitasking can become the definitive features of working with AI.” Fortunately, I am able to use AI tools only when they are genuinely helpful, but other workers may not have that luxury. Across corporate America, companies are pushing people to adopt AI—and some workers are even competing with one another on leaderboards that track individual usage. This has led some people to automate unnecessary tasks to prove to management that they are making use of the technology.

Others are finding they can’t stop talking to their agents. “Spinning up all these agents is sort of like pulling a bunch of slot machines at the same time,” Matthew Kropp, a managing director and senior partner at BCG, told me. If you assign work to a team of agents, you never know precisely what they will get back. Sometimes the bots fail miserably, but other times, they do produce great work. That variable reward, Kropp told me, hacks people’s dopamine circuits. “It’s very akin to gambling,” he said. Rather than taking time for breaks, some people are finding themselves feverishly rotating among different agents.

For all of the justified concern over the...