AI intensifies work rather than reducing it — cognitive overload from parallel agent threads¶
Insight: A Berkeley Haas HBR study of 200 employees (April–December 2025) found AI creates "unsustainable intensity" rather than genuine productivity gains. Workers manage multiple active threads simultaneously — manually coding while AI generates alternatives, running parallel agents, reviving deferred tasks. Tom Dale describes a "mental health crisis" among software engineers: "compulsive behaviors around agent usage, dissociative awe at temporal compression of change."
Detail: Willison confirms from personal experience: "I can get so much done, but after just an hour or two my mental energy for the day feels almost entirely depleted." People are losing sleep finding "just one more prompt" irresistible. The HBR piece calls for organizations to build an "AI practice" that structures usage to avoid burnout. This disrupts decades of existing intuition about sustainable working practices.
Sources
- Simon Willison — "AI Doesn't Reduce Work—It Intensifies It" (2026-02-09)
- Simon Willison — "quoting Tom Dale" (2026-02-06)
Related: existing entry "Skill atrophy risk in AI-assisted coding" in external/ai-assisted-design.md — COMPLEMENTS