AI makes it harder to remain idle
Canonical version: AI makes it harder to remain idle.
AI drastically increases throughput. AI companies and AI gurus keep saying that. And it's (mostly) true. AI does make a difference. When you know the job to be done, it can help you move forward faster than ever before. But there's also a major downside that I keep seeing people describe: it makes it harder and harder to remain idle. There's always an AI waiting for guidance, decisions, input. Kick off an agent, and it needs your attention again before you've even switched contexts. Managing agents is very demanding. And tiresome.
A Hacker News thread titled "It's getting harder to focus every day" captures this well. One commenter admitted Claude Code made his computer as addictive as social media; he built a timer app just to force himself out of the agent loop. Another described giving a Large Language Model (LLM) a task, drifting off to browse, coming back late, and ending the day with a fried mind "even though the LLM did the work". I've been there too. Supervising a dozen AI Agents is a different kind of effort than doing the work yourself: a constant stream of micro-decisions and context switches with no natural pauses. And let's not even think about what this will be like with AI Agent Swarms.
While often thought of negatively, idle time is actually valuable. Daydreaming, walks, relaxing, staring out the window; that's where ideas combine and problems get solved (i.e., what Rich Hickey called Hammock Driven Development). When every minute gets filled by checking on an agent, there's no rest. Attention fragments, and the opportunity for Deep work simply vanishes.
AI is great, and it keeps getting better. But there's a tax to pay for that efficiency. Protect deliberate idle time the same way you protect focus blocks: no screens, no agents, nothing to supervise. The machines can wait.
References
- Hacker News: It's getting harder to focus every day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49032660
- Baird et al., "Inspired by Distraction: Mind Wandering Facilitates Creative Incubation" (Psychological Science, 2012)
- Hammock Driven Development — Rich Hickey, Clojure Conj 2010
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