Matt Kropp

There's this sense of, I have to always be on, my brain is always on.

And then after a number of hours working this way, it describes sort of a buzzing feeling and this sense of just being overloaded that doesn't happen in normal work.

Yeah.

So, you know, we as humans, we can only focus on one thing at a time.

And in normal work, you know, we're really just interacting with one person or interacting with one task.

And so what's happening here is I'm now starting to cue up, you know, a whole set of things that are happening at the same time that I'm having to pay attention to.

And we're just not equipped as a carbon-based species, I guess, to be able to manage that kind of multitasking.

Really, the speed is what's different.

If you think about software development, where this is really happening the most right now,

Doing a task that a human might take hours or days to do, these agents are doing in a matter of 10, 20 minutes.

And so just that compression of a huge amount of work into a much smaller period of time is what really makes this challenging.

What is the cost of this?

So one of the things we found in the study, you know, it's this increases dissatisfaction with work.

It decreases engagement.

It actually increases the propensity for people to feel like they may quit.

If you really have people working in this mode, it's going to affect retention.

It's going to affect morale.

And so we want to be very careful about how we put people into into these kinds of ways of working so that we're not burning them out.

That's a great framing.

And in fact, that's one of the things that we found was this brain fry phenomenon happens when we're sort of excessively working on these high cognitive tasks.