A personal experience of mental fatigue from AI
I wanted to share this personal story because it made me stop and rethink my mental model of AI use, and I hope it might ‘prompt’ a positive impact in others.
I've been throwing myself into the “spec-driven” model of AI product development recently. I differentiate this from vibe coding, where you build the plane on the way down, because it relies on multiple collabor-AI-tion loops: you work on a firm plan together and then you task an AI with building from that well defined specification.
Previously all my AI coding was more like pair programming using Cursor, but now I'm leaning into the CLI and dedicated apps.
At the end of the week, I previously would have had a raft of todos that I needed to progress on Monday when I was back at my desk. Now that I can “prompt and forget” on my phone, I set agents running in the background and check in every few hours over the weekend to nudge them along and steer progress. This sounded great, a weekend of productivity in exchange for some previously dead time around the margins of my weekend plans. I’m now a superhero, right? Not really.
Fast forward to Sunday night. I felt tired, as if I'd never left work.
I realise my brain had never been given the chance to truly switch off. Also, far from being the “easy” part of work, it turns out that decision making and planning is probably as tiring or more than the actual craft of doing something you're experienced with. The flow state of coding is something I'm well aware of but I never considered it to be engaging a different part of my brain until now.
I’m sure there's lots of research on this subject that could have told me all of this before - I've skimmed Thinking Fast and Slow like everyone else and know that there are different thinking modes with their own needs. The concept of decision fatigue is also common enough that it works its way into daily life.
But this was a timely reminder to truly switch off. It’s also a useful steer to discuss and formalise how this new type of work affects our team at Battenhall and will continue to do so as AI is adopted more deeply in coming years.
TL;DR - touch grass, do something meditative and don't think AI work is easy work.