Some concrete flavors of AI fatigue (as an engineer):
1. It’s hard to wrap my head around this kind of relationship: they are your friend, your teacher, and also the thing that might replace your value and take your job.
That dynamic is weirdly philosophical. There’s goodwill and respect in it, but also a quiet trace of betrayal. I still don’t think we’ve fully adapted to that.
2. When AI is too dumb, watching it apologize over and over gets irritating. When AI is too smart, it makes you feel small and slightly useless.
3. AI gives you this illusion that anything is possible, so you greedily start expanding the task.
All the things you used to not be able to finish? Now you suddenly want to do all of them.
The result is something like 30% accomplishment, 20% emptiness, and 50% exhaustion.
4. I often feel like I’m just one step in the loop, even though I thought I was the one directing the whole thing.
Sometimes I genuinely wonder: do I really have agency, or is there just an AI in front of me dangling a carrot?
5. AI never stops producing things. And inside everything it produces, there’s always this 10% layer of junk.
Understanding, filtering, and deleting that 10% takes real mental energy. But if I don’t clean it up, it feels like someone took a dump on my bed.
6. While an agent is running, it keeps saying some kinds of things I’ve never heard of before.
Then I have to decide: should I do /btw, or just move on?
7. Something I thought would take 20 minutes somehow turns into an x-high / ultra run that lasts two hours, followed by three rounds of review before it finally works.
And just like that, a perfectly nice evening disappears.
8. Because there’s so much AI slop everywhere, I’ve become much more restless when I read.
9. Even if you already know the lesson from the Industrial Revolution (increased efficiency doesn’t necessarily reduce working time, it just expands the boundary of work) you still can’t really stop it from happening.
Because humans can’t help themselves. We just want to try.
