The pitch was that AI would give us our time back. Write less boilerplate, delegate the boring parts, go home earlier.
I am not complaining about the tools. I use agents for all of my engineering work now, and I wrote about how that setup evolved and why I still read the code. I can investigate and ship things that would not have been worth starting two years ago.
But somewhere this year I noticed that I am working more than I ever have, and that it feels heavier than it used to. Not because any single task is harder. Because there are so many more of them, all at once.
This post is me trying to understand that, with some data from my own GitHub history.
