'AI brain fry' is real — and it's making workers more exhausted, not more productive, new study finds

A woman in an orange shirt sits by a computer with her fingers rubbing her temples. (Credit: Getty Images)

If you’re one of the early AI adopters, maybe your brain is totally fried. 

Take Francesco Bonacci, a software engineer and founder of Cua AI, who warned of “vibe coding paralysis” last month. In an X post, he described AI’s ability to complete incredible taskloads, leaving workers time to generate new ideas they can then give to bots to flesh out. But the result was not an empowered, productive employee. Rather, it was a mountain of half-finished projects and a human too overwhelmed to complete or make sense of any of it.