04-08-2026IMPACT COUNCIL

How AI is quietly exhausting you—and what to do about it

The productivity paradox with this technology is surprising.

[Photo: Getty Images]

The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of top leaders and experts who pay dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership, and more.

I recently noticed a paradox among a team of developers. With AI, engineers started writing code faster and getting answers in seconds, yet they also reported feeling more exhausted than before.

AI hasn’t actually reduced the amount of work that needs to be done. Instead, it has fundamentally changed its nature. We can now run multiple tasks in parallel and perceive this as productivity. Up to a point, it is. But eventually, managing tools and constantly switching between them becomes more draining than performing the original tasks themselves. In some cases, it even slows down the process of finding a solution.

I’ve been managing developer teams for over 15 years, and I’ve spent the past year trying to understand why AI tools—designed to make work easier—sometimes have the opposite effect. Here are the causes behind this phenomenon and what we can do about it.

WHERE THE FATIGUE COMES FROM WHEN AI IS DOING PART OF THE WORK

Take a developer’s workflow as an example. In the past, when faced with a complex problem, developers would search Google, use Stack Overflow (before ChatGPT arrived), and ask colleagues for help. Each step and decision was separated by reflection time.

Now, they start using Cursor or GitHub Copilot—AI tools that suggest code in real time. The path to an answer gets shorter. But instead of searching, they’re now engaged in continuous evaluation of AI........

© Fast Company