"Cognitive empty nester": ex-Google engineer says agents finished his to-do list
vivekhaldar · x · 2026-11-03
Former Google engineer Vivek Haldar describes becoming a "cognitive empty nester": agents now handle most of what filled his workday—not just coding but manager-style information gathering and synthesis, plus life admin like planning and finances—and he struggles to come up with new things worth doing.
He pushes back on the labs' "just be more ambitious" line: he tried bigger projects, but implemented ideas he thought were deep over a single weekend with agents doing the grungy work. Generating one big ambitious idea per day is the real bottleneck. He also identifies an "absorption limit": creation may be unbounded, but a person's capacity to consume the output is not—a snapshot of the new predicament facing knowledge workers in the agent era.
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