Claude Code · AI Agent · Claude · U.S. · The Atlantic Technology
America Is Headed Toward the Infinite Workweek
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Key facts
- Last year, Steve Yegge started “suddenly getting pounded by nap attacks in the middle of the day
- As Yegge puts it on LinkedIn, his job is to be an “AI babysitter
- People are constantly talking about a white-collar apocalypse,” the MIT economist David Autor told me
- But in other roles, too, such as HR and marketing, where AI is also taking over, rates of reported fatigue were even higher
Summary
Last year, Steve Yegge started “suddenly getting pounded by nap attacks in the middle of the day.” Without fail, Yegge—a programmer and tech blogger—would “hit a wall, fall over, and sleep for 90 minutes,” he told me. In theory, handing tasks off to coding agents should free up time, allowing larger blocks for deep work and rest. As Yegge puts it on LinkedIn, his job is to be an “AI babysitter.” Plenty of people are seemingly starting to feel like depleted AI babysitters. In their own experiments with AI agents, the reporter has experienced some of this brain fog themselves. To get in the mindset of an overstimulated developer while working on this story, the reporter asked Claude Code to deploy a team of agents to supplement their research. The bot promised that the research would be easy. Almost immediately, Claude Code began asking for all kinds of permissions to take actions on their behalf.