AI promised less drudge work, and this is a natural outcome of that. For all that we complained about drudge work, it had a redeeming quality that it was more cognitively lightweight and gave our brains some latent downtime.

It may not seem like it in the moment, but writing code to specifications, or filling out reports in a given template, or formatting power points, was straightforward enough that it gave our brains some respite between cognitively intense bouts of synthesizing what we were about to write down: diagnosis, analysis, problem solving, "stakeholder alignment", design, architecture.

The act of generating the actual durable work product (code, reports, documents, spreadsheets, slides, etc) is largely just translating the results of this cognitively intense phase. It may not seem like drudge work, but it is a lot more mechanistic and hence cognitively lighter, even meditative in a sense. The separation of phases is never that clean, of course, but I think you see what I mean: writing a for-loop is muscle memory, figuring out that you need that for-loop is the hard part.

Now with all that drudge work being done by AI, all we're left with is the hard part. Which is why it feels more stressful: because it is.

Relevant article: https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies...