I've been more productive in the last few months than at any point in my career. My team ships faster, I personally get through more in a day than I used to in three, and the gap between "I have an idea" and "the idea exists" has collapsed to almost nothing.

I'm also more exhausted at the end of the day than I've ever been.

Both of those are true, and I think the relationship between them is the actual story — not the productivity, which everyone's already writing about, but the tax that nobody mentions.

The candy store

The first thing I had to admit is that some of this is my own fault.

When the cost of attempting something drops to near zero, you attempt more. Not more of the work you were already doing — more things, period. The ambitious refactor you'd have deferred for a quarter. The "while I'm in here" cleanup. The third approach to a problem because trying it is now cheap. The tangent you'd never have chased when chasing it meant two days, but will absolutely chase now that it means twenty minutes.

I'm a kid in the candy store. The abundance is real, and my response to abundance is to consume more of it. A lot of my fatigue isn't that the work got harder. It's that I gorged.

That's worth naming honestly, because it's the part of the problem that's actually mine to manage. The tool didn't make me do the extra thing. I did, because I finally could.

The rest that used to be hidden

But the candy store only explains part of it. The rest is structural, and it took me a while to see.

My old workflow had recovery baked into it without my ever noticing. Writing out boilerplate I already understood in my head. Waiting on a build. Googling an error message. Typing code that was a foregone conclusion. Those weren't the valuable parts of my day — but they were low-intensity parts. Micro-recovery, scattered through every hour. Little stretches where my brain coasted.

That's exactly the work that's gone now. I closed all the gaps. And what's left when you remove the easy stretches isn't less work — it's a concentrate of the hard parts, with the rest stops removed.

Decision fatigue is the real bill

And the hard parts are almost all judgment.

My job used to be a mix of producing and deciding, with long runs of production between the real calls. Now it's deciding, more or less continuously. Review this output. Catch the subtle thing that's wrong in a way that looks right. Choose the direction. Accept, reject, redirect. Accept, reject, redirect. All day.

Decision-making draws down a finite resource — anyone who's ever made a great call at 9am and a terrible one at 6pm knows this in their body. I didn't reduce the number of decisions in my day. I multiplied them and packed them tighter. My decision density per hour went somewhere it's never been, and that's the bill that shows up at 5pm as a kind of tiredness that sleeping early doesn't fully fix.

Here's the reframe I keep coming back to: AI didn't reduce the work. It removed the easy work. I'm not jogging a marathon anymore. I'm running sprint intervals — covering far more ground, and paying far more per mile.

Why this is an operational problem, not a personal one

If I'm feeling this, my team is feeling it too.

That's the part that should worry any engineering leader who's celebrating a productivity number right now. "We tripled our output" can quietly also mean "we tripled everyone's cognitive load." Those are not the same sentence, and the second one doesn't show up in any dashboard. It shows up in burnout, in declining decision quality late in the day, in people who look fast on paper and feel fried in person.

I've said for a while that I don't want hero mode on my team — that a pace you can only sustain by grinding isn't a pace, it's a debt. AI makes that principle more important, not less, because it removes the natural friction that used to cap how hard a day could be. The brakes are gone. Pace is now a choice you have to make deliberately, because the work will no longer make it for you.

So is this permanent?

I genuinely don't know yet, and I'd rather say that than pretend.

Some of it is a transition cost. I'm still building the muscle for orchestrating this much output — the deciding gets cheaper as the instincts sharpen, the same way any new skill stops being exhausting once it's automatic. That part should fade.

But some of it looks structural. A workday made of pure judgment with the easy stretches engineered out may just be more tiring than the old one was, full stop. If that's true, the answer isn't to slow the tools down. It's to deliberately rebuild the rest the workflow used to give us for free — and to stop treating raw output as the only number that counts.

I'm still figuring out the candy store part. But I've stopped pretending the exhaustion is a sign I'm doing it wrong. I think it might be a sign I'm doing it right, and haven't yet learned how to pace it.