{"id":8765,"date":"2026-02-12T18:12:29","date_gmt":"2026-02-12T18:12:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/ai-burnout-machine\/"},"modified":"2026-02-12T18:12:29","modified_gmt":"2026-02-12T18:12:29","slug":"ai-burnout-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/ai-burnout-machine\/","title":{"rendered":"AI Is a Burnout Machine"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Some software engineers are finding that AI is speeding up their work, but at a cost: it\u2019s also accelerating them towards burnout.<\/p>\n

Siddhant Khare is one of those programmers. In an interview with Business Insider<\/em><\/a>, he lamented that while AI has made him more productive, it\u2019s also led him to feel that his job was harder than ever.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe used to call it an engineer, now it is like a reviewer,\u201d Khare told BI<\/em>. \u201cEvery time it feels like you are a judge at an assembly line and that assembly line is never-ending, you just keep stamping those [pull requests].\u201d<\/p>\n

AI, he argued, creates a productivity \u201cparadox\u201d by lowering the cost of production, but increasing the cost of \u201ccoordination, review, and decision-making,\u201d all of which falls on a human to solve.<\/p>\n

\u201cI shipped more code last quarter than any quarter in my career,\u201d he wrote in an essay<\/a>, titled \u201cAI Fatigue Is Real,\u201d posted on his blog. \u201cI also felt more drained than any quarter in my career.\u201d<\/p>\n

Khare\u2019s account echoes the findings of a recent study reported in Harvard Business Review<\/em><\/a>. After closely monitoring the two hundred employees at a US tech company, the researchers observed that AI was actually intensifying work<\/a>, instead of reducing workloads. Forming a vicious cycle, AI \u201caccelerated certain tasks, which raised expectations for speed; higher speed made workers more reliant on AI,\u201d the researchers wrote. \u201cIncreased reliance widened the scope of what workers attempted, and a wider scope further expanded the quantity and density of work.\u201d<\/p>\n

AI adoption was voluntary at the company, and the initial enthusiasm for experimenting with the AI tools helped boost productivity.\u00a0But this caused a nefarious \u201cworkload creep,\u201d in which the employees, without realizing it, took on more tasks than was sustainable for them to keep doing. Multitasking also became more common, with some employees finding that they were no longer focusing on one task, and instead were continually switching their attention, creating the sense that they were \u201calways juggling.\u201d<\/p>\n

Khare described something similar. Before AI, he wrote in his essay, he might spend a \u201cfull day\u201d in \u201cdeep focus\u201d over one problem.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow? I might touch six different problems in a day,\u201d he wrote. \u201cEach one \u2018only takes an hour with AI.\u2019 But context-switching between six problems is brutally expensive for the human brain. The AI doesn\u2019t get tired between problems. I do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Khare also blames AI for why his coding skills have seemed to regress.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s like GPS and navigation. Before GPS, you built mental maps. You knew your city. You could reason about routes,\u201d Khare wrote in his blog post. \u201cAfter years of GPS, you can\u2019t navigate without it. The skill atrophied because you stopped using it.\u201d<\/p>\n

That said, Khare isn\u2019t anti-AI. He believes he can find a way to keep using it in a healthy way, which in a different context might be interpreted as the clich\u00e9 excuse of an addict. He\u2019s experimented with several ways to keep his AI habit in check and recommended some for his readers, too. But some of the onus also falls on AI companies, he argues.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou need to keep some sort of guardrails for the humans, so they don\u2019t self-destruct themselves,\u201d Khare told BI<\/em>.<\/p>\n

More on AI:<\/strong> Fear Grows That AI Is Permanently Eliminating Jobs<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

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The post AI Is a Burnout Machine<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Some software engineers are finding that AI is speeding up their work, but at a cost: it\u2019s also accelerating them towards burnout. Siddhant Khare is one of those programmers. In…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177,3121,3842],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","category-finance","category-future-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8765"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8765\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}