I am pretty sure most of us haven’t heard about “AI Fatigue”. And no, it is not related to fatigue for AI, but for humans working on AI. It is a phenomenon where humans face mental exhaustion, burnout, and emotional drain from the constant interaction with AI systems. And if someone would have told me this 2 years back, I would have laughed it off. But it is real and it is happening.
The AI fatigue arises with interactions with complex AI systems, rapid pace of technological change and the constant pressure to keep adpating to new tools and processes. Just look at the github repos that are propping up like mushrooms every day. And look at the number of stars the repos are receiving if it is related to AI. In the last 2-4 months itself, I have stared multiple repos related to AI tools & usage like oh-my-codex, oh-my-claude, AutoClaude, AutoAgent, open-ralph-wiggum, etc.
Some of the features are now incorporated into AI tools themselves (eg: Claude code featuring the /loop command which mimics ralph-wiggum loop). OpenClaw has received upwards of 300K stars on Github! The first release of OpenClaw was on 25th November, 2025. Fast-forward to today and it features more than 57.3K forks, 303K stars, 1.5K watchers, 74 tags, 678 branches, 1.1K contributors and more than 18K commits! Imagine the pace of development and releases.
This is just one repo on Github. There are thousands of such repos. If you follow Andrej Karpathy on social media, it will be very difficult to not get overwhelmed by the pace of information and technologies that is being released by the Genius. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that Andrej single handedly is pushing the bounds of AI. And then ofcourse we have companies like Nvidia, Google, etc. open-sourcing the models and the newest techniques and papers on optimizing AI training and inferencing. New models are released almost on a weekly basis which are pushing the limits and optimizations are happening at 5x-10x every month. Just follow some of the benchmarks and you will be flabbergasted.
It is nearly impossible to keep up with the pace of development, absorb the knowledge, keep oneself updated and then ofcourse implement and experiment with the new tools and techniques. It is leading to a burnout and fatigue among the developers, practitioners and AI users. The constant change, increasing complexity of the AI systems, tools and technologies as well as the varied progress and new tool drops every week takes a toll. As an AI practitioner, I would very much like to keep myself updated with the latest and greatest architectures used in frontier models and the different attention mechanisms implemented. But sometimes I feel like I am just scratching the surface and there is so much more to learn and understand.
I was creating a set of automated rules & agents for my codebase to comply to ISO26262 requirements and ASPICE L2 processes last week. And the amount of information, multiple ways of doing it (claude, cursor, OpenCode, etc.), automatic data and deployment pipelines, etc. was simply too overwhelming for me. I was implementing one set of rules & agents and then realized that there is a better one which could also do everything that my agents are doing + function X. So I used to focus on that one and so on. Also, I wanted to make the skills and agents generic and keep out the specifics so the interworking became ultra-complex. And then I experienced the AI fatigue firsthand.
I could not sleep, I was constantly on github, reading latest and greatest papers, jumping between using multiple tools and agentic workflows, hosting my own servers for not only CI/CD but also automation and trying to estimate the savings in terms of human effort if those things were made live. I finished one task, moved on to another and then realized that I could have architected better based on the latest information that I have. This was going on in a loop since the last couple of weeks. And I was exhausted. My cocentration levels were low, I felt the need to do constant task & context switches, I felt the need to absorb all the knowledge in an instant and I could not wait/see a task to completion. I had given up on my exercise routine and my weekends were also no different than the weekdays! I was constantly doing everything I can to squeeze everything into the 24 hour window. And frankly speaking, I was suffering.
And then the wakeup call that I had to stop doing what I was doing as I could see how unsustainable my lifestyle had become. I took a step back, paused all activities, started planning tasks and went back to the discipline of organizing my thoughts, routines and plan out my context switches. I not only setup boundaries on what I should do, but how I should do it, but prioritize my life. I let go of the need to keep myself updated and on edge all the time. I realized that it is OK to not be on top of the latest and greatest that is churining up on the internet everyday. All of that helped me overcome my AI fatigue.
So take care everyone. If you have ever suffered AI fatigue, I would love to hear your experience and how you overcame it. As a saying goes, we should control AI instead of AI controlling us!
Happy AIing!
