The day-to-day wear of working with agents

19–25 October 2026

Monday, 19 October

When You Can't Stop Prompting

Article · Daria Golub · dariagolub.substack.com

The researchers identified a cycle they named workload creep: AI accelerates tasks, which raises expectations for speed. Higher speed increases reliance on AI. Greater reliance widens the scope of what people attempt. Wider scope expands the volume and density of work further. There’s no natural stopping point.

The speed feels good — until it doesn’t. On Hacker News, a developer posted: “I used to code for nearly 14 hours a day on weekends, and before AI code agents existed, this felt manageable. However, now that I’m building products at breakneck speed with AI assistance, I’m experiencing severe cognitive overload combined with serious mental burnout.” The pace that AI enables doesn’t feel unsustainable in the moment. It feels exciting. The crash comes later.

Working with AI means holding your intent in working memory while simultaneously evaluating whether the agent’s output matches that intent. You’re building and auditing at the same time. That dual-track processing is cognitively expensive in a way that pure coding never was.

When you’re at capacity, every unmade decision costs you. Which Slack message to answer first. Whether to review that AI-generated PR now or after lunch. When to stop sending prompts to your coding agent. Each micro-decision draws from the same cognitive pool you need for architecture work and complex problem solving.

Implementation intentions are “if-then” rules you commit to in advance, so you don’t have to decide in the moment when your working memory is already full (Gollwitzer, 1999). A meta-analysis across 642 tests confirmed they reliably reduce cognitive load and improve follow-through, even under high pressure (Sheeran, Listrom & Gollwitzer, 2025). They work because they shift decision-making from being effortful to automatic.

Sit down once, during a calm moment, and write specific rules for your highest-friction decision points:

“If two agents are already running, the next idea goes straight to my backlog.” → sequencing

“If I received an AI-generated output, I’ll put it into sequence and review later” → sequencing

“If I work for 1 hour straight, I take a break” → pauses

“If it is 9:30pm, then I close the laptop. Even if the agent is mid-task.” → pauses

Structured Cognitive Offloading

Your working memory holds roughly four items at once (Cowan, 2001). Every unresolved concern — the bug you haven’t logged, the output you are waiting from the agent, the PR you are reviewing — occupies one of those slots. When the slots are full, your ability to do complex work degrades. You feel foggy, reactive, unable to focus.

Cognitive offloading means deliberately moving information out of your head and into external systems, so your working memory is freed for the work that actually requires it (Risko & Gilbert, 2016).

Tuesday, 20 October

What Do Humans Do While the Agents Run?

Article · Tony Wood · tonywood.org

You can line up a whole stack of agent tasks. You can keep ten things moving. You can use every pause to start another run. You can keep yourself at 100 percent for eight, ten, twelve hours, constantly switching, constantly checking, constantly loading and unloading context.

That will look productive for a while.

It may also burn people out.

Because the work is not just waiting. The work is repeated re-entry into complexity. It is picking up a thread, understanding what the agent did, making a decision, and then placing the next thread carefully.

“Any idiot can face a crisis; it’s this day-to-day living tha...”

Quote · Anton Chekhov

Any idiot can face a crisis; it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out.

Wednesday, 21 October

Ernährung: Warum Pommes Zu Einer Gesunden Ernährung Gehören | ZEITmagazin

Article · Elisabeth Raether · zeit.de

Ein Stück Kuchen, auch ein richtig süßes Stück Kuchen jeden Tag macht eine gute Ernährung also nicht ungesund. Eine Tiefkühlpizza auch nicht. Oder Chips. Oder was auch immer einem so sehr schmeckt, dass man sich nicht vorstellen kann, darauf zu verzichten. Man kann gesund essen, ohne seinem Lieblingsessen abzuschwören.

Die Studie liefert auch den Beleg dafür, dass man gar nicht die ganze Zeit gesund essen muss, um gesund zu essen.

Die Durchführung der Predimed war sehr aufwendig. Nicht nur unterzogen sich die Teilnehmer regelmäßigen ärztlichen Untersuchungen. Sie wurden auch genauestens zu ihren Essgewohnheiten befragt, und zwar mithilfe eines Fragebogens. Dieser Fragebogen stellte ihnen ganz konkrete Fragen, und anhand der Antworten ermittelten die Wissenschaftler dann, wie »mediterran« der jeweilige Teilnehmer sich ernährte.

Thursday, 22 October

Haven’t I Written About This Before?

Article · A Room of My Own · spasic.me

I’ve been feeling quite overwhelmed lately, mostly with work, but also with life in general. I haven’t been eating particularly well, I’ve felt like I’m gaining weight, and I know I need to get back to looking after myself properly.

So what did I do?

I started reorganising my ebook collection.

And I kept on doing this despit the fact that I’m fully aware that whenever I want a book, I simply search my Dropbox and send it to my Kindle. It takes hardly any time. I don’t need to reorganise thousands of files to make that happen.

Yet there I was, spending hours on something that served absolutely no purpose.

The thing is, I find this kind of work relaxing. It’s repetitive, it doesn’t require much thinking, and it gives me something to focus on when I’m feeling stressed or overwhelmed. I can lose myself in it for hours. Maybe it’s like knitting or crocheting but with nothing to really show for it.

Saturday, 24 October

Releasing Judgement as a Practice

Article · Sasha Chapin · sashachapin.substack.com

But judgement is information about you more reliably than it’s information about the world. I have decided that it would be better if my wife did more meditation. What’s the real information there, what I can actually verify? I can’t actually verify that she would be happier. Meditation doesn’t always work, and maybe her current activity is the relaxing thing she needs. What I can verify for sure is that I’m currently not okay with the way that she is.

The truth is that people pay good money for longing. They seek it with romantic poems, films, nostalgia about their early years. Occasionally people opine that they miss the passion of their teenage desires. All of that is still right there, if you dare to realize you want so much you’ll never get. The best case scenario is that you’ll deeply love a bunch of people who will die. If you relax into that, settle into that, you notice that it’s vital, vivifying. When you stop shying away from your longing, it opens you to the world. You can be devastated by insolvable lack, without having an issue with that. I’ve never managed to find peace by making myself into a fortress. But I can, when I’m lucky, find peace in being continuously shattered, right now.