AI Fatigue Is Coming  🔗 **Source:** [AI Fatigue Is Coming](https://davidspinks.substack.com/p/ai-fatigue-is-coming) > [!note]+ Document Notes > --- > tags: > - ai-fatigue > - ai-adoption > - burnout > - community-building > - human-connection > author: David Spinks > source: https://davidspinks.substack.com/p/ai-fatigue-is-coming > reference: https://davidspinks.substack.com/p/ai-fatigue-is-coming > date created: 2026-09-15 > --- > > [!info] Generated analysis — not the author's words. Sections below are machine-written > > from the captured source. Only text inside `> [!quote]` blocks is verbatim from the author. > > Do not quote or attribute any other line to the named author. > ## 🏷️ Title > **AI Fatigue is Coming** — David Spinks, personal Substack, ~860 words. A founding figure in community building (CMX) argues that heavy daily AI use produces a specific, novel exhaustion, and describes rolling his own usage back. > ## 🧭 Table of Contents > Title · Contents · References (in-page) · Summary · Main Content (Notes) · References · Paraphrase · Newsletter · Action Items · Hypotheses · Methodology · Questions · Future Research · Implications · Learning Styles · Accessibility · DEIB · Logical Validity · DARVO · Conclusion · Refactor Appendix > ## 🔗 References (in-page) > Exactly two outbound links; everything else is unlinked assertion. > - Library of Congress item 2020715038 — https://www.loc.gov/item/2020715038/ (header image credit) > - DavidSpinks.com — http://davidspinks.com (the author's coaching practice, closing CTA) > No studies, surveys, or third-party reporting are cited. The only named tool is Claude, mentioned once as tracking his to-do list. > ## 📝 Summary > **What happened.** After months of daily AI use Spinks reports brain fog, body tiredness, and disembodiment, and names four mechanisms: *amplified multitasking* (starting is cheap, so he starts too much; he cites his ADHD), a *verification tax* (it errs, ignores his rules, needs extra review rounds), *atrophy and agency drift* (planning outsourced until the tool starts making business decisions for him), and *empty social calories* — the genuinely new part: hours his mind reads as social that carry no social nutrition. He concedes the first three are not AI-specific, reports a partial rollback, doubts he has cut enough, and predicts fatigue is coming for everyone. > **Why it matters.** A trusted community voice publishing a defection narrative at peak adoption pressure. If power users hit fatigue first, the curve reaches communities before analyst reports. > **Stakeholders.** Community and DevRel staff told to ship AI-assisted work faster while owning a room's emotional weather; contributors under usage mandates; maintainers absorbing AI-generated patches. > **Risks.** n-of-1 generalized to everyone; usable as anti-AI ammunition or as grounds to dismiss worker complaints as adjustment pains. An unfacilitated "AI fatigue" thread becomes a venting spiral. > **Bottom line.** Trust the symptom inventory, not the forecast. > ## 📖 Main Content > The structure: a hook asking readers to check their own body, four diagnostic passes, one concession, one novelty claim, a remedy list, and a closing question that turns a personal essay into a community prompt. > The strongest move is the concession — admitting pre-existing weaknesses removes the "that's a you problem" rebuttal and narrows the novelty claim to the social mechanism alone. The second is that the remedy is asymmetric: he evicted AI from creative work and decisions and kept it where it performs. That is a portfolio decision, not a moral stance. The weakest third is the ending, where a bounded account becomes a universal forecast with no bridge. > ### 🗒️ Notes > - **The verification tax is the measurable part.** Time-to-accept, rework rounds, share discarded — log it and argue dosage with data instead of vibes. > - **"Empty social calories" is the phrase that will travel.** A compact frame for parasocial substitution that names what community work actually sells. > - **Agency drift is the quietest risk.** Not "it does my work" but "it's started to make decisions for me" — governance, not productivity. AI-assisted triage quietly becomes the roadmap. > - **Mode collapse in feedback.** Advice that "locks onto the same feedback norms" is a warning for AI in mentorship, contributor review, and onboarding, where specificity is the whole value. > ## 📚 References > **Primary (present in the source):** > - David Spinks, "AI Fatigue is Coming" — https://davidspinks.substack.com/p/ai-fatigue-is-coming > - Library of Congress item 2020715038 — https://www.loc.gov/item/2020715038/ (the only external institution linked) > - DavidSpinks.com — http://davidspinks.com (the author's stake: he sells human coaching) > No claim rests on outside work, so there is no literature to chase on the essay's behalf. Rather than manufacture citations the author did not make, this section stops here. > ## 🗣️ Paraphrase > *Paragraph by paragraph, in the analyst's words.* > 1. Do you also feel foggy, disconnected, and body-tired after months of daily AI use? > 2. He has noticed it in himself and now sees the sources. > 3. **Mechanism one.** AI runs his planning, yet he juggles too much because starting is cheap — ADHD running hot. > 4. **Mechanism two.** It errs, ignores his rules, needs repeated review; like someone who half listens. > 5. **Mechanism three.** Savings are real, but long outputs and constant management consume them; he has left family time to unblock agents. > 6. **Mechanism four.** The to-do list costs the feel of his day, email the writing muscle, planning has let the tool shape decisions. > 7. **The concession.** Multitasking, time management, and delegation were already weak points. > 8. **The novelty claim.** Hours go to a robot, not a human with feelings and a shared social web. Empty social calories. > 9. **The symptom.** Disconnection and disembodiment, like a social media hangover but stranger. > 10. **Novelty decay.** Once the wow factor faded, awe became impatience. > 11. **Ambient load.** Constant management at both ends of the day, promises unmet. > 12. **The rollback.** No creative work, some processes manual again, no delegated decisions — and doubt it is enough. > 13. **Whittling.** He adopted wholesale and is trimming to the few things it does well. > 14. **Forecast and invitation.** He predicts broad fatigue soon and asks whether it is happening to you. > ## 📰 Newsletter > **Empty social calories, and what they cost a WordPress community** > David Spinks — who professionalized community building with CMX — just published ["AI Fatigue is Coming"](https://davidspinks.substack.com/p/ai-fatigue-is-coming). It is not a hot take, it is an inventory: foggy, tired, re-reviewing output that ignores the rules he set, sneaking away from family to approve agent requests. Every contributor who has "just quickly triaged one more ticket" during dinner knows that tug. > So, a permission slip. If your Meetup's next three topics are all AI, swap one; run a session where people bring the workflow they *stopped* using. In [Training](https://learn.wordpress.org/), resist opening every module with a chatbot. In Support and Docs, if AI drafts cost more review rounds than they save, write that number down instead of arguing vibes in [Slack](https://make.wordpress.org/chat/). For Core AI and [Performance](https://make.wordpress.org/performance/), the sharpest warning is drift: keep the human on the decision, the machine on the draft. Bring snacks. Touch grass. > ## ✅ Action Items > ### DevRel > - Add one pulse item: *"In the last month, has AI-assisted work left you more tired, less tired, or about the same?"* Local data before the 2026 calendar is set. > - Log the verification tax (rework rounds, time-to-accept, percent discarded) beside time-saved claims. > - Protect one flagship human-to-human program per quarter — office hours, pair debugging, mentor matching — defended on connection and retention, not reach. > ### OSPO > - Guidance on agentic tooling and off-hours interrupts: approving agent actions after hours is not an expectation. > - Put the drafting-versus-deciding boundary in policy — AI may draft, summarize, and triage; humans own roadmap and prioritization. > - Track AI-assisted contribution review burden so the cost lands in the same ledger as the throughput gain. > ### [](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!9CRX!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd9f2671a-0c74-40fc-989c-3edd2d7bf8d2_310x310.jpeg)Image Source: [Library of Congress](https://www.loc.gov/item/2020715038/) Are you noticing it too? That brain-foggy, disconnected, body-tired feeling you get after using AI every day for months in a row? I’ve been noticing it more and more within me, and I’m starting to recognize where it’s coming from… First, I use AI to help me stay focused, working with it on quarterly planning, weekly prioritization, and daily task management. Yet, I find myself juggling way too many tasks at the same time because “AI is doing it for me”, and diving into many topics at once because I can. My ADHD is on overdrive with AI. It’s like multitasking on steroids. And then AI always seems to get things wrong and require extra rounds of reviews. I’m tweaking my routines but never feeling totally secure that it’s going to be right the next time. I set rules that it never quite follows correctly. It’s like working with someone who half listens and just can’t seem to get things right. Exhausting. AI is supposed to save me time and energy, and it does. There are some tasks that would have taken me hours that I can do in just minutes. Yet, I find myself spending loads of time and energy reading through its lengthy responses and managing it throughout the day. I’m definitely not less busy. And the worst part is that I found myself sneaking off during family time to approve requests and keep my agents moving. I’m also feeling the downsides of outsourcing so much to AI. When Claude is tracking my to-do list for me, I stop reviewing it thoroughly myself each morning, and I lose that feel for how things are flowing in my workday. When I use it to write responses to an email, I’m losing the muscle of crafting thoughtful messages. When I rely on it to help me plan, I realize that subtly, it’s started to make decisions for me about where to take my business. AI’s inability to fully follow through on its promises, and the way it slowly brings me into becoming more reliant on it, is starting to weigh on me. But none of this is necessarily unique to AI. I’ve long struggled with multi-tasking, time management, and delegation. Undoubtedly, some of this is on me to develop better boundaries and systems. But what makes the brain fog and exhaustion of using AI different is that all of this time, hours every day, is spent talking to a robot. I’m not problem-solving with another warm-blooded human with feelings, depth, and a shared social web. I’m talking to a semi-intelligent wall. I’m tricking my mind into thinking its getting social interaction but it’s not. It’s empty social calories. It’s loneliness fuel. It’s this increased interaction with robots that leaves me with this strange sense of disconnection and disembodiment. Sometimes I finish my workday and I feel like I’ve been lost in a different realm. It’s kind of like the feeling I get after scrolling social media for too long, but weirder and even more distant. I need to touch grass, tickle some trees, and talk to a human to come back to this planet and my body. More and more, I’m finding that using AI is not all that enjoyable once the early wow-factor wears off. I’ve gone from “HOLY SHIT IT CAN DO THIS?” to “Is this the best it can do???” Oh how quickly we humans adapt to new norms. It’s becoming something that I’m constantly managing and pouring energy into. It’s waiting for me at the start and end of every day. It’s something that’s becoming ever-present in the background of my life, and that I’m not so sure is fulfilling most of its promises. I’m starting to pull back. I’ve stopped using it entirely for most creative work. I’ve cut some of my processes and gone back to just doing it myself. I’m being really careful about not asking it to make any decisions for me. I was using it for coaching supervision, and have slowed that down too, after realizing how it seems to just lock onto the same feedback norms, whether they’re right or not. I’m creating more rules for it to help me use it more intentionally. But I’m not sure I’ve pulled back enough. I feel like I adopted it wholesale, and now I’m whittling it back to the core things it can do well, that don’t exhaust me, and keep the rest in the human realm. Part of me wants to just ditch the whole thing. Do I really need this? I can’t imagine I’m alone. This is probably happening for a lot of people if it’s happening for me. My guess is AI fatigue is coming for everyone sooner rather than later. Is it happening for you? [](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5eAI!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdc152b05-b1b2-421d-8cc1-81c811ea4afc_940x100.png) [](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!fReg!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbfafab76-117b-43b4-95ca-da42f3fac352_940x100.png) **Work with me:** I coach leaders and community builders to help them figure out where they want to go in their business and life, and shift the beliefs and patterns that hinder them from getting there. Learn more and schedule a chemistry call at [DavidSpinks.com](http://davidspinks.com) Previous ##### I’ve been feeling real foggy-brained after heavy AI usage. Have you?, AI Fatigue Is Coming, David Spinks, 01m2jr7bycz999tnj42ejy4fpp.