AI fatigue won’t hit everyone the same way, AI researcher Gary Marcus said.
“In some domains, AI might actually make a person’s job more fun,” Marcus told Business Insider.
Software engineers are increasingly discussing how AI is draining them. Siddhant Khare, who builds AI tools, recently wrote about how he’s experiencing AI fatigue.
“If someone who builds agent infrastructure full-time can burn out on AI, it can happen to anyone,” Khare wrote.
Marcus said that not all industries are set to be disrupted in the same way AI has upended programming and engineering.
“If somebody needs to do some artistic work and they don’t really have artistic talent, it might be fun to get the system to make them feel like they have a superpower,” he said.
However, Marcus said he isn’t surprised that programmers are beginning to feel fatigued.
“Some people in coding, in particular, probably feel like constant pressure, and now they feel like what they’re doing is debugging somebody else’s code, instead of writing code,” he said. “Debugging somebody else’s code is not particularly fun.”
The feeling Marcus described echoed what Khare told Business Insider when asked to expand on his AI fatigue.
“We used to call it an engineer, now it is like a reviewer,” Khare said. “Every time it feels like you are a judge at an assembly line and that assembly line is never-ending.”
Steve Yegge, a veteran engineer, said companies should limit employees’ time spent on AI-assisted work to 3 hours. He said AI has “a vampiric effect.”
“I seriously think founders and company leaders and engineering leaders at all levels, all the way down to line managers, have to be aware of this and realize that you might only get three productive hours out of a person who’s vibe coding at max speed,” Yegge told The “Pragmatic Engineer” newsletter/podcast. “So, do you let them work for three hours a day? The answer is yes, or your company’s going to break.”
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