Three lessons for the agent era: don't outsource paper reading, deep work, or your attention
ZeYanjie · x · 2026-10-26
A heavy AI user shares three lessons from the agent era:
- Don't rely on agents to read papers or high-quality blogs — thinking depth drops sharply, inspiration triggers vanish, and you waste time parsing the agent's muddled paraphrasing.
- Don't mix technical learning with language learning — constant task-switching delays deep thinking and leads to burnout.
- Don't run background tasks just to burn unused tokens — without a stable workflow, the instant gratification of vibe coding will hijack your attention and break deep work.
Bottom line: keep measuring whether your cognition is actually improving in the agent era, or you'll sink into shallow work and lose the patience for long-form reading and deep thought.
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