- Author
- Stephan Schmidt
- Published
- 14 July 2025
- Kind
- Personal blog post on one developer's experience
- Original
- www.tabulamag.com/p/too-fast-to-think-the-hidden-fatigue
- Subject
- Review, taste and expertise
- Themes
- Skill under automation
What it is
Stephan Schmidt writes about building Marvai with Claude Code and Cursor. The post describes a fatigue the author had not felt before. It offers causes and a short list of needs.
What it says
- The author feels fatigued after as little as one hour of reviewing fast AI output.
- AI output arrives faster than the brain can form a coherent picture, the author says.
- The post links the fatigue to a faster dopamine loop and more context switches.
- Reviewing and directing AI output is more stressful than writing code, the author says.
- The author compares it to a factory machine setting the pace of a worker.
- The post proposes deliberate pacing, AI-aware retrospectives and attention to mental health.
What evidence it gives
The evidence is one person's experience on a personal project, plus a factory analogy. The post cites the book Team Topologies for cognitive load. No survey, measurement or study is given. One commenter says the post matches their own feelings.
Interests and limits
The author builds Marvai, a prompt package manager, alone. Fatigue is self-reported and untested. Causes such as dopamine are asserted without citation. The post dates from July 2025.
Connections
These links are this wiki's own reading, not claims the sources make.
- Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code. Schmidt says AI output outruns the forming of a coherent picture. Retyping slows input to the speed of hands. A commenter objects that thinking drives learning, not typing. So which part helps, the typing or just the delay?
- Viable Systems: How To Build a Fully Autonomous Agent. Kellogg calls an agent's view of its own health an algedonic signal. Building one proved difficult. Schmidt describes fatigue after an hour of fast review. A person gets that signal for free. What would an agent's fatigue be for?
- Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself and bloom. Karlsson says frequent switching leaves attention residue, and that sustained attention deepens experience. Schmidt reports fatigue from constant fast review. Read together, that fatigue may be more than overload. It may be the cost of never letting attention bloom.