By now, it’s a well known phenomenon. AI induced burnouts.
The brain fog a lot of developers experience may not simply come from distraction or intellectual laziness, but from software engineering itself changing shape.
The difficult part of the job is increasingly less about writing code and more about expressing intent clearly, managing agents, reviewing their output, testing, adapting infrastructure, and keeping up with a much faster development cycle. That creates a different kind of mental load: lots of supervision, context switching, judgment, and uncertainty rather than long stretches of focused implementation.
At the same time, there is also an emotional side to this uninvited transition. Part of the exhaustion may come from losing some sense of control and having to let go of the craftsmanship that gave us some pride.
Delegating more of the implementation can feel like giving up part of the “art” of software engineering, even when the result is greater productivity.
The discomfort I and many others feel may therefore be partly an adjustment to a new professional reality in which our value shifts from doing every technical step ourselves to directing, evaluating, and shaping increasingly autonomous systems.