AI-Driven Development Is Faster. So Why Am I So Tired?

cuz you're experiencing what i call an AI Hangover

It definitely makes sense when you say that “context” has become the new bottleneck. AI will allow us to program more efficiently, but if we leave our decisions in fragments spread across different systems such as PRs, Notion, Figma, and Slack, it means that we have to figure out how all these fragments fit into the puzzle.

This really resonated with me. AI can absolutely make development faster, but I think the part we underestimate is the mental cost of constantly reviewing, questioning, correcting, and keeping track of everything it produces.

When you write the code yourself, you naturally build a mental model along the way. With AI, you can get to the result much faster, but sometimes you’re left trying to understand a much larger amount of code and decisions after the fact. That can be a very different kind of tired.

The line between “I’m being more productive” and “I’m just processing more information” feels surprisingly thin here. Maybe the next challenge with AI-assisted development isn’t making AI generate even more code—it’s figuring out how to reduce the cognitive load that comes with supervising it.

Really relatable perspective.

the codebase part hit home. when the ai wrote most of it, nobody actually holds the why anymore, so you end up being the human context window for the whole team, and that's tiring in a way writing code never was. i work on grunz, a coding agent, and even there the thing we fight most isn't the code it writes, it's keeping the original intent alive across a long session. did anything actually help on the planning side, or is it still mostly meetings?

Because reviewing three times as much generated code requires more mental bandwidth than writing it yourself ever did.