Cheng Lou, React pioneer now at Midjourney, warns of "reading fatigue" from the constant influx of AI agent content
E/acc founder Beff agreed, calling it a real burnout.
Many users report that the surge of AI agent output has destroyed their reading ability and focus, creating fatigue, lower attention, endless summary cycles, and even depression from constant low-density slop.
No Digg Deeper questions have been answered for this story yet.
Most Activity
Slop processing burnout is very real
I'm starting to get reading fatigue from agents. So much to read all the time. This is either doing a great service or disservice to attention span
@_chenglou have it generate html artifacts to convey information instead!
@_catwu what if I get artifacts fatigue
@_chenglou You could do “efficient” tone and caveman skill, makes it more compact
@_chenglou This is why you have an ELI5 orchestrator running your agents that translates all responses into nice snackable bites for our TikTok-addled brains
@_chenglou fr
@_catwu @_chenglou I use the html docs skill to create no slop artifacts
> npx @html-docs/cli install
@_chenglou it's like a book with no page numbers because the book is infinitely long
@_chenglou Before AI we just called this “fatigue”
@_chenglou its about time humans upgraded to be able to consume the information as fast as its synthesized.
@_chenglou Same - I’m used to reading a lot (volumes of War and Peace, scientific research, briefs and report), but the amount of reading and effort done for reviewing and giving feedback is draining.
@_chenglou you are acquiring a skill, which good lawyers get after some time.
filtering texts for important info, leave building blocks, grammar, unnecessary sentences and honey smearing out.
@_chenglou and ask followup questions. At that point it asked me if a want to patch and commit now, go into planning, or other followup actions that either terminate the conversation or escalate it.
FWIW "planning" in my case it another skill that the priming skill hands off to as needed.
@_chenglou I made a skill that I start every conversation with that helps escalate from the any question/request/investigation/troubleshooting from soup to nuts. The important mid (sometimes end) point is a "sketch". Basically a plan that is bite sized that is meant for a human to read...
@_chenglou The worst aspect is not the reading which is actually helping me but wondering whether it is 5th Google search page garbage or actually reliable info.
@_chenglou it certainly alters your memetic makeup
@_chenglou The problem for me is that LLMs are programmed to vomit code all at once, without even giving you time to comprehend or discuss it with it. it's too programmed to solve problems in one go and I absolutely despise it.
@_chenglou the real premium feature in 2026 won't be "more context"
it'll be "fewer words, same answer"
@_chenglou going to start telling parents when they ask that their kid should skip cs and get a lit degree instead
@_chenglou Btw the latest plank that I added to this was something like "after we've done the work, shipped the plan, or solved the problems wrap up by telling me if we have any loose ends, things to explore, or other reasons to keep the session open or should I close it".