When Using AI Leads to “Brain Fry”

Harvard Business Review: “A new study finds that certain patterns of AI use are driving cognitive fatigue, while others can help reduce burnout...AI promises to act as an amplifier that will drive efficiency and make work easier, but workers that are using these AI tools report that they are intensifying rather than simplifying work. This problem is becoming more common. Firms are incentivizing employees to build and oversee complex teams of agents—for example, by measuring and rewarding token consumption as a proxy for performance. Meta, for one, includes the number of lines of code generated by AI as a performance metric for engineers. As enterprises use more multi-agent systems, employees find themselves toggling between more tools. Contrary to the promise of having more time to focus on meaningful work, juggling and multitasking can become the definitive features of working with AI. Unsurprisingly, workers are finding themselves up against the limits of their cognitive abilities when working this way. In recent weeks, online AI users have described increased cognitive load, “saturated” attention, and mental fatigue in social media posts. Engineer Francesco Bonacci, founder of Cua AI, wrote a popular X post titled “Vibe Coding Paralysis: When Infinite Productivity Breaks Your Brain” in which he lamented: “I end each day exhausted—not from the work itself, but from the managing of the work. Six worktrees open, four half-written features, two ‘quick fixes’ that spawned rabbit holes, and a growing sense that I’m losing the plot entirely.”

As a research group that studies emergent workforce and AI trends, these signals caught our attention. The literature is filled with mixed signals on the relationship between AI and worker burnout. (Burnout is as a state of chronic workplace stress consisting of exhaustion, negative feelings about work, and decreased effectiveness on the job.) Some studies suggest that using AI to replace tiring tasks alleviates exhaustion; other studies, sometimes on the same populations, show AI use worsening burnout outcomes. The emergence of acute, overwhelming mental fatigue with intensive AI oversight—as distinct from burnout—adds new complexity to the picture. To understand what was going on, we conducted a study of 1,488 full-time U.S.-based workers (48% male vs 51% female; 58% independent contributors vs 41% leaders) at large companies across industries, roles, and levels. We asked them about patterns and quantity of AI use, work experiences, and cognition and emotions…”