Ask HN: Are you tired too in this AI era?

Hacker News Discussion ↗

Engineers and knowledge workers describe feeling mentally overloaded in the “AI era,” not because tools like LLMs are useless, but because they accelerate output, increase context-switching, and flood them with low-quality code, text, and expectations. Many say they are more productive than ever yet less fulfilled, struggling to maintain craftsmanship, focus, and a sense of control while being pushed to manage multiple agents, review AI-generated work, and keep up with relentless hype and competition. A minority report feeling energized and empowered by AI, but even they note the need for stricter boundaries, new workflows, and deliberate breaks to avoid burnout.

Workload, Context Switching, and Fatigue

  • Many describe severe mental fatigue from managing multiple AI agents, PRs, and tasks in parallel, with constant context switching.
  • The “manager of mid-level engineers with bad memory” metaphor appears repeatedly: you’re no longer coding, you’re supervising and triaging.
  • People report difficulty entering flow state, remembering what they did yesterday, and tracking architecture across many AI-generated changes.

Productivity Gains and Role Shift

  • A large group feels dramatically more productive: weeks of work compressed into days or hours, higher test coverage, faster shipping.
  • Several say their role shifted from “coder” to “architect/product engineer/director,” focusing on design, requirements, and review.
  • Some run elaborate multi-agent pipelines with review bots, telemetry loops, and custom tooling; others deliberately avoid this and use lightweight completions to stay in control.

Quality, Testing, and Slop

  • Strong concern that AI-generated tests and large PRs are not meaningfully reviewed; some teams ignore AI-generated reviews as too hard to verify.
  • People worry about bugs slipping through, tests that don’t actually test anything, and codebases no one fully understands.
  • Others argue this isn’t fundamentally different from pre-AI missed bugs, just at higher volume.

Emotional Impact and Loss of Craft

  • Many feel sad or hollow: coding used to be the source of joy and identity; now they feel like they’re delegating their favorite part to a machine.
  • Some fear skill atrophy and “getting dumber,” with shorter attention spans and less curiosity about “why.”
  • Anxiety is amplified by investor/management pressure to “token-max,” chase competitors, and justify not moving even faster.

Diverging Attitudes

  • A vocal minority finds this era exhilarating and empowering: more agency, more experiments, easier learning, new side projects, and even career reinventions.
  • Others are exhausted or depressed by hype, AI everywhere (including hobbies), devalued labor, slop-filled internet, and economic precarity.

Coping Strategies

  • Suggested tactics: strict limits on parallel work, planned breaks, grounding away from screens, personal tooling (dashboards, journals, custom agents), adjusting AI “personality,” and consciously accepting “less than maximum” productivity.