Gary Marcus flags AI agent fatigue: managing coding agents burns out engineers
GaryMarcus · x · 2026-10-15
Gary Marcus shared a developer's account of "AI agent fatigue," adding that genAI is bad for many people's mental health.
Key points from the quoted thread:
- Software has historically been measured in lines of code; coding agents now generate 100x more than humans, so engineers are expected to do 100x more in the same time.
- Managing agents is more exhausting than writing code: constant context switching keeps you in effortful System 2 monitoring instead of the flow of implementing a well-designed feature.
- Juggling multiple agents and unsticking them from dumb deadlocks adds to the drain.
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