AI brain fry hits developers as mental exhaustion spreads among heavy users of artificial intelligence

Life with AI causing human brain 'fry'

New York (AFP) - Heavy users of artificial intelligence report being overwhelmed by trying to keep up with and on top of the technology designed to make their lives easier. Too many lines of code to analyze, armies of AI assistants to wrangle, and lengthy prompts to draft are among the laments by hard-core AI adopters. Consultants at Boston Consulting Group (BCG) have dubbed the phenomenon "AI brain fry," a state of mental exhaustion stemming "from the excessive use or supervision of artificial intelligence tools, pushed beyond our cognitive limits." The rise of AI agents that tend to computer tasks on demand has put users in the position of managing smart, fast digital workers rather than having to grind through jobs themselves. "It's a brand-new kind of cognitive load," said Ben Wigler, co-founder of the start-up LoveMind AI. "You have to really babysit these models." People experiencing AI burnout are not casually dabbling with the technology -- They are creating legions of agents that need to be constantly managed, according to Tim Norton, founder of the AI integration consultancy nouvreLabs. "That's what's causing the burnout," Norton wrote in an X post. However, BCG and others do not see it as a case of AI causing people to get burned out on their jobs. A BCG study of 1,488 professionals in the United States actually found a decline in burnout rates when AI took over repetitive work tasks. Coding vigilance For now, "brain fry" is primarily a bane for software developers given that AI agents have excelled quickly at writing computer code. "The cruel irony is that AI-generated code requires more careful review than human-written code," software engineer Siddhant Khare wrote in a blog post. "It is very scary to commit to hundreds of lines of AI-written code because there is a risk of security flaws or simply not understanding the entire codebase," added Adam Mackintosh, a programmer for a Canadian company. And if AI agents are not kept on course by a human, they could misunderstand an instruction and wander down an errant processing path, resulting in a business paying for wasted computing power. 'Irritable' Wigler noted that the promise of hitting goals fast with AI tempts tech start-up teams already prone to long workdays to lose track of time and stay on the job even deeper into the night. "There is a unique kind of reward hacking that can go on when you have productivity at the scale that encourages even later hours," Wigler said. Mackintosh recalled spending 15 consecutive hours fine-tuning around 25,000 lines of code in an application. "At the end, I felt like I couldn't code anymore," he recalled. "I could tell my dopamine was shot because I was irritable and didn't want to answer basic questions about my day." A musician and teacher who asked to remain anonymous spoke of struggling to put his brain "on pause", instead spending evenings experimenting with AI. Nonetheless, everyone interviewed for this story expressed overall positive views of AI despite the downsides. BCG recommends in a recently published study that company leaders establish clear limits regarding employee use and supervision of AI. However, "That self-care piece is not really an America workplace value," Wigler said. "So, I am very skeptical as to whether or not its going to be healthy or even high quality in the long term."

The AI burn out: How and why is brain fry entering the lexicon of AI coders

Developers are experiencing burnout from intense AI coding sessions. Tools like Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex are generating vast amounts of code, overwhelming even top engineers. This 'brain fry' leads to mental fatigue and slower decision-making. Some researchers have quit leading AI firms citing exhaustion. Organizations are exploring strategies to mitigate this growing issue. Running a startup could throw your schedule into chaos. Yet, Kalyan Sivasailam, founder, 5C Network, an AI-based radiology platform, made it home by 10 pm most of the days and could tell himself "Done for the day." But that is no longer the case. After coming home, he now fires up his computer; multiple projects that he works on - from AI interview platform for radiologists to building AI agentic workflow for his startup - come alive in the dead of night. Sivasailam runs five Claude Code instances, one Google Antigravity and one OpenAI's Codex. "There is so much code being generated that you can easily get lost in building and verifying them," he told ET. Sivasailam is part of a growing number of builders, who are spending more time than ever in intense coding sessions that results in burnout for some. He says this fatigue is quite widespread in his network. He sees some of the top engineers in his team are burning themselves out. This cognitive overload has overwhelmed even the best of engineers working in frontier labs. Multiple people working in OpenAI and xAI have quit in recent months after feeling totally drained. On February 26, OpenAI researcher Hieu Pham posted on X that he was leaving the firm due to burnout. "I cannot believe I would say this one day, but I am burnt out. All the mental health deteriorating that I used to scoff at is real, miserable, scary, and dangerous," he wrote on X. He said that he would take a break and move his family to home country Vietnam, where he wanted to try something new and allow himself time to heal. A couple of weeks later, another researcher Haotian Liu announced he was quitting Elon Musk's xAI after two years of intense work. He helped build the video generation model grok imagine. "...shipping it as a great product used by millions, all within 6 months, at age 28: I feel proud. But now it's time for me to move on. I'm burnt out..," Liu wrote on X. The brain fry A recent The Harvard Business Review report, authored by CXOs at Boston Consulting Group, has termed this as 'brain fry' referring to the mental fatigue from excessive use of AI tools beyond one's cognitive ability, with 14% of the workers reporting mental fog, headaches and slower decision-making. Multiple founders and industry watchers ET spoke to shared that for power users of the technology, the work had only intensified instead of easing. As technology has improved productivity, more complex workloads have been thrown at developers. Unlike in the past, the number and kind of decisions a developer needs to make has changed, explains Prasanna Krishnamoorthy, managing partner, Upekkha, an AI accelerator. "Earlier, these developers were making coding decisions. But now with AI doing most of the actual coding, the kind of decisions they make are changing, and that is also creating burnout," he said. Before the advent of AI coding tools, developers were making decisions about what language and datasets to use. Now that has given way to higher level decisions about the kind of architecture, design and products to be built, which were usually taken by senior developers, and often within a short time adding to the stress. "Given the pace of developments, all these decisions need to be taken quickly," he added. That is not the only problem. For many developers, who are exploring AI and building side projects , these tools are often addictive. Ashwin (name changed to protect identity), an AI researcher at one of the frontier AI companies, usually builds a couple of hobby projects on the side. But in the past year, he was able to build at least 4-5 side projects due to the sheer capabilities of these models. "It is like an addiction, because you are seeing how the code works and the more it does, the more you want to continue, leading to burnout," he added. Since you are not looking for an outcome but building it as a toy project, this becomes addictive like gambling, says Krishnamoorthy. What can be done? Ashwin has now started taking breaks between coding marathons. "Earlier I would go for weeks working on one side project after another, till 2 am. But now, I take a break for a week or two between intense coding sessions." 5C's Sivasailam says he sits down with his team to talk about this topic. "The first thing to do is reset the mental framework on what can be done using AI," he says. One of the challenges is that for many senior developers it is harder to accept the shift that the job boils down to managing AI agents instead of writing code. The study by Harvard Business Review points out that where one is using AI tools is also important. It noted that using AI to reduce repetitive tasks see 15% lower burnout rates compared to those who do not use AI. "At the organizational level, directionally, practices like providing clear AI strategy and offering training seemed to help," the report noted.