Most of the work we did before had friction built into it. You had to search for an answer, wait for a colleague, read the documentation, or simply admit you were stuck. That friction was annoying, but it also brought structure to your day. It created natural pauses where you could step back and ask whether you were still working on the right thing.

AI removes almost all of that friction. Ask a question, get an answer. Ask for a refactor, get a refactor. Ask "what else could we do with this?" and you will never, ever run out of suggestions.

And so you keep going. One idea leads to three more. Those three turn into a prototype, the prototype turns into something that looks suspiciously like a real project, and somewhere along the way you stopped deciding and started reacting.

The uncomfortable part is that none of this feels bad while it is happening. It feels great.

The AI never sighs, never says "not now", never tells you your idea is half-baked. It fulfils your wishes, immediately and enthusiastically. Every prompt gives you a small reward, and the next one might give you a bigger one. That is a very old pattern, and it is not one our brains are particularly good at resisting.

We recognise this pattern instantly when we see it in a game or a social media feed. We are much slower to recognise it when it is dressed up as productive work.

There is a small detail I keep coming back to.

While the model is working, words drift across the screen. Spelunking. Considering. Scampering. Nobody really knows what they mean. I am not sure they mean anything at all.

And yet we sit there, watching them, mildly impatient about when it will finally be done. Ten seconds feels long. Thirty seconds feels unreasonable.

That impatience is worth paying attention to. The waiting has become part of the loop. We are not just using a tool anymore; we’re waiting for it to do its work.

Here is where it stops being a curiosity and starts being a concern.

You can end a day like this having produced a lot, and still not feel satisfied. Not the pleasant tiredness of hard work well done, but something flatter. You have been busy for eight hours and you cannot quite say what you decided.

Over weeks, this adds up. The signs are familiar to anyone who has been close to burnout: difficulty stopping, difficulty starting, a creeping cynicism about work that used to excite you, and the feeling that no matter how much you produce, it is never a finished amount.

In the AI’s Impact on Team Dynamics series I wrote about the tension between speed and depth for teams. This is the same tension, but pointed inward, at the individual.

I love to run, and running taught me a lesson that applies here.

If you run every training session at the pace that feels good in the moment, you will get faster for a few weeks and then you will break. Endurance is not built by going hard. It is built by knowing when to stop, and by making rest a deliberate part of the plan rather than something that happens when your body forces it.

Nobody finishes a long run by accident. You decide the distance before you start.

None of this is an argument against working with AI. It is an argument for putting the stopping points back in yourself, since the tool will not provide them.

A few things that help:

AI is a great tool, and I have no intention of putting it down. But it is a tool with no built-in sense of enough, and that makes it different from almost everything else we work with.

The endlessness is not a feature we asked for. It is a side effect, and side effects are our responsibility to manage.

So decide your distance before you start. Notice when the waiting starts to pull at you. And the next time it is late and the screen asks whether it should pick up just one more task, remember that "not now" is a perfectly good answer too.

The goal was never to produce the most. It was to build something good, with enough left in the tank to build the next thing tomorrow.