After a 10 hour 'flow state' deep coding session , you had this buzzing but not unpleasant feeling of needing your brain to fold back into reality. After a 3 hour frantic agentic coding stint, you are just mentally exhausted from the sheer speed and volume of actions and descisions taken.
On top, you feel the perceived 'opportunity cost' of non-productive hours skyrocketed, and everyone that cares feels like they are constantly 3 steps behind where they want to be on keeping up with the latest changes (that are very real steps, not just like the past hype frameworks shifts or language or tool fads).
This is going to end in lots of burnout and substance abuse along the way.
But whereas that's like reading a book, the way people are using agents is like scrolling tick tock. If you have 6 or 7 agents going, and you want to keep the pipeline full, you are constantly context switching. Your brain never has a chance to get into deep focus mode. Your attention is constantly being yanked from one thing to the next.
The same thing happens to me if I let myself get distracted at work and try to focus on too many things at once (emails, teams, Jira, actual work...). My brain feels like a fractured mess.
There are some good books on the subject if you're interested:
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains — by Nicholas Carr
Amusing Ourselves to Death — by Neil Postman
Dopamine Nation — by Anna Lembke
Things are too weird now. Alomst makes me want to just teach music lessons again for way less money. Sigh