[npilk]

Yes, spending time working with Claude Code leaves me feeling the same way I feel after a day scrolling Reddit and HN - a thin, jittery, frayed sort of weariness. It's almost like gambling, with inconsistent dopamine hits, but it adds an element of keeping track of an ever-increasing number of projects and to-dos.

[scuff3d]

Humans are notoriously bad at multitasking. In the "traditional" way of writing software, you'd spend hours focused on one or two things. You'd tick one thing off the list and move to another, usually with some kind of logical connection between them. Its similar to reading a novel, one long continuous narrative requiring prolonged attention. It's exhausting in its own way, but it doesn't leave you feeling fragmentation and wrung out.

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