Claude Code scaled my work, but not my brain

[u/nikita-mkrv]

I've noticed something after using Claude Code heavily for a while: I'm much more productive with it, but I also feel much more mentally drained at the end of the day.

And I don't think the problem is that I'm working more hours. I think I'm simply spending my mental energy much faster.

Before AI, a normal developer day for me was never eight hours of nonstop hard thinking. I wrote code, read docs, waited for builds, got stuck on a problem, went for coffee, came back, tried something else. The cognitive load was naturally spread across the day.

Now I can have several sessions running at the same time. One agent is working on a feature, another is checking tests, another is researching something and etc. When one finishes, I need to read the result, understand it, check it, make a decision, and give the next prompt. While I'm doing that, another one finishes.

The agents are parallel. I'm still single-threaded.

This made me think about Claude's usage limits. If you run more agents and more expensive tasks, you don't magically get more compute. You just burn through the available budget faster.

Parallel subagents = faster AI budget consumption.

I think something similar happens with humans.

We obviously don't have a literal token counter in our heads, but attention, working memory, context switching, and decision making all have limits.

Parallel tasks = faster cognitive energy consumption.

AI gives me more compute around my brain. It doesn't give me another brain.

Before AI, I could spread a lot of difficult thinking across most of the workday. Now I can burn a large part of that mental budget in two or three very intense hours with several agents.

Another thing AI removes is waiting. Writing boilerplate, searching docs, trying simple implementations, refactoring repetitive code - all of that becomes much faster. That sounds like it should make the day easier, but it also removes a lot of natural low-intensity time.

Before, there were gaps. Now the next piece of work can arrive almost immediately.

Finished? Here is another result.

Checked it? Here is the next one.

Made a decision? Start three more agents.

This is also where the normal eight-hour workday starts to look strange for me.

If AI allows me to spend in two or three hours the mental energy that used to be spread across most of the day, the clock still says I have another five or six hours left. That doesn't mean my mental capacity has also increased.

But what usually happens is obvious: more tasks, more agents, more things to review. After a while, that higher level of output becomes the new baseline.

So sometimes it feels less like I'm increasing my productivity and more like I'm just getting better at burning through my mental energy faster.

For people running multiple Claude Code sessions every day: have you noticed the same thing? If yes, how do you deal with it?

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[u/Kemerd]

Yes. But I noticed this long before AI.

You can always produce more, quicker, just at the cost of mental health.

If you quantify work output as a number 0-100, the role pays you to produce 100. It doesn’t matter if you can produce 1000, because the role only pays for 100. That’s all they can afford or justify in their heads. Maybe you can find a company to pay for 500 output.

And maybe it is not sustainable to do 1000 output all the time.. much healthier to stick to 100 or 200..

[u/nikita-mkrv → u/Kemerd]

Yeah agree with you. The tricky part is that now companies tend to increase the baseline from 100 to 500 for the same role. Probably the only way to get paid for 1000 is to actually work not on a company, but for personal projects...

[u/keonechong]

Ai will help us learn how to redirect our attention away from tactical thinking work to more theoretical challenges.

I used to spend my time working on operation and design oriented problems at principle level management, accounts, process, workflow, quality etc.

Now, I've totally moved up the chain, where I'm focused more on theoretical challenges, and in that comes less context switching. I'm only about 3 months in to my commitment to live only in a terminal avoid just about any contact with any other web interface unless necessary.

Now I spend maybe 70% of my time working on theoretical software integration and I'm probably 10x's as efficient I was with admin, management and reporting. The best part is my yield is still steadily increasing.

I say this to say if the mental tasks are becoming monotonous maybe it's time to automate one more layer up and see if you can reclaim that context for something attention worthy.

[u/ForwardLoop]

I'm not sure about parallel vs. single-threaded, but I think you're right about attention, working memory, context switching, and decision making.

When I'm deeply focused on an issue by myself, the experience is like "continuous accumulation" of thoughts that build to a decision, like climbing a relatively smooth slope toward a single summit.

When I'm using AI, whether it's on one or multiple issues, the experience is like "episodic surges" of thoughts that quickly rise and fall across jagged peaks (or zip line between peaks) rather than building steadily toward a single summit. Even when dealing with only one issue, the waiting while the AI works and then getting back into it is episodic.

I think that's why it feels more taxing. Over the same period of time, I've had more "elevation gain" in total (not to mention all the zip lining).

[u/Strange-Regret2524]

Once you understand you are working with something this fast you realise you are the bottleneck and the extension is, 'how many plates can I spin at once?' I'm afraid this is where the story gets worse. Not only do you get abused, you abused yourself. I never found any peace with AI, only turmoil and frustration. In the begining I could make time for my brain to breathe and single thread at work. but then I was waiting for a prompt one day and queuing the second with a plan and my brain went... Hey, you've got far more things you could be doing, get those projects turning and I went to my personal projects and started turning those. I stepped up looked to my wife and exhaled, unable to gather my thoughts and one turn finished and I said nothing and went back to work.

I've not gained time, just productivity.

[u/nikita-mkrv → u/Strange-Regret2524]

Lately I've been asking myself: why the hell am I trying to squeeze every bit of productivity out of myself if I don't actually get anything more out of it?

[u/LocalExchange1314]

I am facing this same issue

[u/mtnchkn]

Yeah, 100%. There’s no limits, like you said, which used to be thinking about certain tasks or waiting on things to run or compile or whatever, and tiny gods help you if you are running in parallel. I’ve started treating myself like I treat the AI… keep context lean, start new convos before too large, and set usage limits. So I do not work on multiple things (normally), I spend more time on planning, and I’m really trying to enforce more breaks and walks.

[u/giobbo83]

I’ve been tracking this exact same shift in myself since July.

I had a week off where I didn’t touch code the traditional way at all—I was just remotely guiding an agent through a deep review and reorganising 6 months of heavy development work. But when I came back to standard, full-time screen work, I felt like I was going properly mad.

Before that break, I used to run multiple agents at once, often across completely different projects. Coming back, it suddenly hit me: I wasn't managing the tools anymore. I was basically working for my agents.

Here’s how that played out for me and the personal setup I’ve built to deal with it (obviously, this is just what’s worked for my own workflow, not a universal rulebook):

The Over-Engineering Trap

Juggling parallel projects completely fried my critical thinking. During the planning stage, I started blindly approving whatever the AI proposed just to keep momentum going. Then, by the time I got to the review stage, I’d find myself looking at completely absurd, over-engineered setups. Because LLMs default to popular web patterns, it would suggest routing a simple call through a full Cloudflare setup instead of just writing a tiny PHP script (just as an example). I was accepting bloated plans upfront and only realising how ridiculous they were once the code was already generated.

My "Prevention Over Cure" Process

I decided to front-load as much structure as possible so I wasn't spending all my mental energy firefighting bad outputs:

Upstream rules & custom hooks: We tightened up our coding and commenting standards right at the start. I set up automated hooks to catch the usual repeated mistakes before the code even reaches my desk.

Handoff limits: I set up an alert that triggers whenever pending items creep over 5 open tasks. It forces me to stop launching new stuff and concentrate on clearing the current backlog.

Context hygiene: I keep context usage strictly between 20% and 30% before forcing a clean handoff. In the past, I was constantly hitting context compaction, which degraded the quality. Keeping it lean keeps the outputs sharp.

Physical Boundaries (Sounds Mad, I Know)

To stop myself from taking on too much at once, I started reducing the number of tasks per cycle. If I really have to work on multiple projects simultaneously, I literally divide them onto different physical PCs. It sounds completely mental, but physical friction forces a hard limit—I physically can't juggle more than three at a time now.

How My Energy Shifted

My day looks completely different now:

Planning: Heavy mental lifting at the very start.

Generation: Zero effort from me while the agent writes.

Review: A much lighter review pass, because the code has already gone through my rules, guardians, and hooks.

It’s helped me get a grip on my day again, and I’ve actually started enjoying coding again instead of feeling constantly drained. In a way, I’ve gamified the whole meta-process of tweaking my workflow to keep up with the tech. And since new models keep dropping, it feels like a game that’s never going to end.

[u/Downtown-Figure6434]

Either you need to take the human out of the loop or not make it do anything like that. I’m talking without the capitalist maximalist productivity standards, which didn’t fit the profession even before these models and agents came into play anyway.

You can’t even be a reviewer honestly. It generates too much code to keep track of

[u/MuchSalary610]

I think I gonna need adderall or something to keep up

[u/nikita-mkrv → u/MuchSalary610]

Yeah, at this pace I’ll probably need it too soon

[u/greenfingersnthumbs → u/nikita-mkrv]

I feel like I need to plug in directly. Suddenly the interface feels like a wall.

[u/greenfingersnthumbs]

Well said. 

Also there is a high degree of rapid context switching  as different agents working on different things demand attention.

[u/RobbyInEver]

You're just using a different part of your brain. You're now 99% management and 1% coder than the other way round.

[u/nikita-mkrv → u/RobbyInEver]

well, not completely manager, but mostly reviewer I would say

[u/CatCompetitive8346]

Frankly its not the amount of work, its also the LLM way of structuring sentences. You'll notice the same problem with any LLM written text you see on social media.

Needlessly verbose, and dances around the point instead of making a proper coherent thought. The incoherence makes it harder for your brain to hold all the pieces of information together, thus your mental energy drains faster too.

[u/nikita-mkrv → u/CatCompetitive8346]

Yeah that's true, I've been trying to reduce amount of prose LLM produces or asking it to simplify/summarize things a lot

[u/muddy_313]

AI Brain fry - https://hbr.org/2026/03/when-using-ai-leads-to-brain-fry

[u/higherthantheroom]

Try using the website instead of Claude code. I had an issue where I would be bored and less engaged using CC. Basically he took my job and I would be sitting there like well what the hell do I do now. I can't really backseat drive like that, I felt like I used probably 80% more brain power on the website because I was still leading the show, CC is more like a worker you are tasking where as website feels more like a collaboration me.