'AI-pilled' engineers are working harder and burning out faster, Django co-creator says

• Simon Willison, the co-creator of Django, said juggling AI agents can feel "mentally exhausting."
• Willison said he's still bullish on AI's tools. He's just surprised at how tired they make him.
• He said he's talked to other software engineers who are losing sleep over their AI obsessions.

Part of AI's core promise is to take over mind-numbing tasks for humans.

Simon Willison — the co-creator of both Django and Datasette with more than two decades of software engineering experience — says some uses of AI actually make him feel more tired.

In an episode of "Lenny's Podcast," released Thursday, Willison said using AI coding agents has made his work faster and helped him with research.

They've also made his work more intense, he said, and he feels the effects before noon.

"Using coding agents well is taking every inch of my 25 years of experience as a software engineer, and it's mentally exhausting," he said. "I can fire up four agents in parallel and have them work on four different problems. By 11 a.m., I am wiped out for the day."

His experience highlights a growing pressure point in the AI boom: While companies pitch AI as a way to save time and boost productivity, some early adopters say it's also making their work more mentally demanding.

Willison said the fatigue has become more noticeable since November, as more advanced agentic AI systems and open-source tools have made it easier to run multiple autonomous workflows at once. He said he and other engineers have struggled to balance their work and personal lives.

"There's a sort of personal skill we have to learn, which is finding our new limits," he said. "I've talked to a lot of people who are losing sleep because they're like, 'My agents could be doing work for me, I'm just going to stay up an extra half-hour.'"

Willison isn't alone. Researchers and critics — including authors at Harvard Business Review and Gary Marcus, a professor emeritus of psychology and neural science at New York University — have warned that AI tools could stretch workers too thin rather than lighten their load. Running multiple AI agents can accelerate output, but it also requires constant oversight, they warned.

Those concerns diverge from the future vision imagined by some of the biggest players in AI, who say autonomous agents will take more work off humans' plates.

In a March interview, Vinod Khosla, one of OpenAI's largest investors, said he believes most of today's five-year-olds won't have to get a job when they're adults. In February, Boris Cherny of Anthropic said the software engineer job title would be phased out of the US workforce this year.

When asked about other "AI-pilled" workers, Willison said he's "standing in defense" of engineers, warning that the obsessive dynamic can start to resemble compulsion.

Willison said even with the downsides, he's still using AI tools because they amplify his abilities.

"I am getting more time, but I am exhausted," he said. "The exhaustion from that sort of intensity of work has been a really big surprise for me."