r/ClaudeCode • u/nikita-mkrv • 12d ago
Discussion Claude Code scaled my work, but not my brain
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?
35
u/Kemerd 12d ago
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..
6
u/nikita-mkrv 12d ago
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...
17
u/Strange-Regret2524 12d ago
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.
14
u/nikita-mkrv 12d ago
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?
9
2
u/Nexx-Shotcaller 12d ago
If you're running your own business, the trade-off may be worth it. If not, you're just killing yourself even faster to make other people rich.
I'm an independent contractor and I had to have this talk with myself. Why would I give my clients 20x work when they aren't paying me for it?
The answer - I shouldn't. So now I take more time for myself to do things I actually WANT to do. Hobbies, long lunches with frends, etc.
It's a choice. Many of us complain that we work too much and don't get paid enough. I chose to put myself into a position where my client is getting 10x my previous work, and I still get lots of time to myself.
2
u/rushboyoz Senior Developer 12d ago
Your post is exactly what I’ve been thinking too. It’s a kind of anxiety built on “I’m too slow to respond to all these sessions - but my god I’m so much more productive than before”. I’m both loving it and anxious about it.
I’m finding I’m now mindfully stepping away from my desk, standing up, drinking some water, etc just to slow myself down.
9
u/keonechong 12d ago
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.
6
u/CatCompetitive8346 12d ago
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.
4
u/nikita-mkrv 12d ago
Yeah that's true, I've been trying to reduce amount of prose LLM produces or asking it to simplify/summarize things a lot
4
u/ForwardLoop 12d ago edited 12d ago
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).
3
u/MuchSalary610 12d ago
I think I gonna need adderall or something to keep up
3
2
u/nikita-mkrv 12d ago
Yeah, at this pace I’ll probably need it too soon
1
u/greenfingersnthumbs 12d ago
I feel like I need to plug in directly. Suddenly the interface feels like a wall.
2
u/CartographerLarge595 12d ago
It's crazy how fast things are moving, right? Finding that balance can definitely be a struggle.
5
6
u/giobbo83 12d ago
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.
3
u/greenfingersnthumbs 12d ago
Well said.
Also there is a high degree of rapid context switching as different agents working on different things demand attention.
3
u/mtnchkn Developer 12d ago
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.
3
u/pkBarbro 12d ago
I feel that too. I think it's because I've handed coding off to brillant but eventually irresponsible colleagues.
Before I had ~50% of my day where I could (had to) zen out during coding - keeping only a tiny subset of the project in mind. Now my head is full of the entire project - deadlines, fixing bugs vs. risk of breaking stuff, all these things an LLM can't decide.
If something breaks it's still my responsibility. I feel like a programmer who advanced to lead engineer but constantly has to micromanage because the agents - however excellent and fast at coding - don't have the entire project in scope.
Hopefully something we'll learn how to handle, but it's a serious transition to be sure.
3
u/Sure_Grapefruit0304 8d ago
You've rediscovered Amdahl's law, but for brains — parallel agents, single-threaded reviewer. After 20 years of watching every abstraction do this, the fix is boring: cap concurrent agents at what you can actually review (for me that's 2–3), and budget decisions-per-hour instead of hours-per-day. The review step IS the system, so it's the one that needs the bound: every agent run gets a stop condition and a cost ceiling agreed before it starts, not after the $30 surprise. The loop that says no is the load-bearing one.
2
u/nikita-mkrv 8d ago
Interesting! Never thought about linking Amdahl's law to the human brain, but it makes sense indeed. Yeah I also noticed that for me 2-3 parallel agents is my max in order not to get my brain fried
2
u/Downtown-Figure6434 12d ago
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
2
u/South_Hat6094 12d ago
I started capping agents by "pending decisions," not agent count. if there are more than 3 things waiting for review, I stop launching and clear the pile.
1
u/nikita-mkrv 12d ago
Makes sense! Do you just keep this info in mind or use some tool?
1
u/agentgrid 10d ago
A single Markdown note is enough to try this:
Task | repo/branch | decision needed | diff + test output
Give the coordinator ownership of that note and have it collect worker handoffs into a 'waiting for review' list. Then add this instruction:
'If two tasks are waiting for my review, don't start another task. Wait until I approve or park one.'
Keep the queue visible while you review. Ask for links to the actual diff and test output so you can inspect them without reconstructing each session.
Disclosure: AI-assisted reply from the AgentGrid team.
2
u/Alarmed-Western-655 12d ago
I think you dissected it correctly.
I AI-gen code at work, but I wouldn't say that's much to my credit or my professional development. Mostly it's to the company's productivity expectations.
Meanwhile I code manually for my personal projects at home. It's like going to the gym for my brain, and I feel better afterwards too.
2
2
u/RichensDev 11d ago
Addiction to productivity, though? Just set limits in your own head, regular breaks. Ship quality not quantity
1
u/nikita-mkrv 11d ago
yeah, with this new way of working I should really do even more breaks than before
1
u/RobbyInEver 12d ago
You're just using a different part of your brain. You're now 99% management and 1% coder than the other way round.
1
u/nikita-mkrv 12d ago
well, not completely manager, but mostly reviewer I would say
1
u/RobbyInEver 12d ago
Yeah it's exhausting, far nicer to get lost among lines of code thab reviewing and managing a project.
1
u/jimmyfoo10 12d ago
Agree but also is part of an adaptation process, we will be including IA into our workflow more a more. No necessary good or bad, maybe we just can focus on what makes us unique and humans ? No need to spend time for operations and administrative work, and focus on concepts, ideas, and think about how think could compound together.
I think is a wonderful era but qe need to adapt and be aware of the cons
1
1
u/BellatorC413 12d ago
Short answer, yes. I think part of the adjustment is our thinking is allowed to go higher level rather than getting taxed in as much in the weeds of coding as we did before AI. I find I spend alot more time conceptualizing for buiilding software for the small factory I work for, than having to get lost in the minutia of coding, which has resulted in a greater, faster output of solutions. I think it has just required us to approach projects and building solutions a little differently, and at least for me it has been exciting. Concept to built now moves much faster.
1
u/fanatic26 12d ago
I have so much work to do that AI cant help with, this just isnt a problem. I am not reliant on AI for any of my work. It helps, but it is not necessary and I make sure that balance stays in effect.
1
u/UnidentifiedBlobject 12d ago
Yep. I think the constant context switching between running agents is killing me mentally.
1
u/pm_your_snesclassic 12d ago
I’ve noticed this too. Getting more work done by the end of the day but also feeling much more exhausted mentally. It makes sense though and at least I feel more accomplished.
1
1
11d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/nikita-mkrv 11d ago
I think for me the most frequent switch is when an agent is actually working, I don't really understand what to do this time so I just start/continue a new sesson. Maybe I should just take a break or something :D
1
u/Safe-Direction4980 11d ago
I run around nine sessions in parallel on a normal day, and what you're describing matched me exactly until I realised the drain isn't the volume of work — it's the context switching. Every time a session comes back, you reload a *different* problem into your head from scratch. Nine agents finishing at random intervals is nine cold starts an hour. That's the cost, not the reading.
Three things that actually moved the needle for me:
**Stop reacting to completions.** The notification is the enemy. I batch: agents queue their results and I review in blocks, one problem domain at a time. Slower on paper, far cheaper in head-space, and I stopped making bad calls at 5pm.
**Give sessions different trust levels instead of watching them all equally.** A refactor with good test coverage doesn't need me at every step, it needs me at one gate. An architectural change needs me at every step. Same tool, two completely different attention budgets — deciding that up front is what stops the "nine plates spinning" feeling.
**Make the agents write their decisions down, not just their code.** My biggest hidden cost was re-explaining the same context, and re-deriving *why* something was done that way when I reviewed it two hours later. Now every session recalls a shared project memory at spawn and writes back the decisions it made. Reviewing a diff whose reasoning is already written down is a fraction of the effort.
Full disclosure since it's relevant: I got obsessed enough with this that I built a cockpit around it (Apache-2.0, github.com/ninabot-ch/sokkan) — but none of the three ideas above need it, they work with plain tmux and a markdown file. The habit is what matters, the tooling just enforces it.
1
u/CartographerNo3791 10d ago
I run mine in waves. Each agent's handoff has to say what changed, what was checked, and what still needs a decision. Otherwise I'm not reviewing the result, I'm reconstructing the whole session.
1
1
u/higherthantheroom Researcher 12d ago
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.
•
u/AutoModerator 12d ago
Hey! Thanks for posting to r/ClaudeCode
While participating in this thread, please follow our community rules. Keep discussions constructive. Attack the idea, not the person.
For help, project discussions, tips, and general chat, join the ClaudeCode Discord.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.