AI researcher Gary Marcus said AI fatigue doesn’t hit everyone in the same way.
“In some fields, AI may actually make people’s jobs more enjoyable,” Marcus told Business Insider.
Software engineers increasingly discuss how AI is draining them. Siddhant Khare, who develops AI tools, recently wrote about how he feels about AI fatigue.
“If someone building agent infrastructure full-time can get burned out on AI, it can happen to anyone,” Carre wrote.
Marcus said that not all industries will be disrupted in the same way that AI has transformed programming and engineering.
“If someone needs to do an artistic job, but doesn’t actually have any artistic talent, it can be fun to use the system to make them feel like they have superpowers,” he says.
But Marcus said he’s not surprised that programmers are starting to feel fatigued.
“Some people, especially those involved in coding, may feel pressured all the time, and now feel like what they’re doing is debugging other people’s code instead of writing code,” he said. “Debugging other people’s code is not particularly fun.”
The sentiments Marcus expressed echoed what Keir told Business Insider when asked about AI fatigue.
“We used to call them engineers, but now they’re more like reviewers,” Carre says. “Each time, I feel like I’m a judge on an assembly line, and that assembly line never ends.”
Veteran engineer Steve Jaegge said companies should limit the time employees spend on AI-assisted tasks to three hours. He said AI has a “vampire-like effect”.
“I seriously think that engineering leaders at all levels, from founders to company leaders to line managers, need to recognize this and realize that you might only get three hours of productive time from someone who’s vibecoding at top speed,” Yegge told the newsletter/podcast Pragmatic Engineer. “So, do you want them to work three hours a day? The answer is yes. Otherwise, the company will go out of business.”
