00:00One of the promises of AI was alleviating the burdens of Silicon Valley.
00:05Instead, it's inducing anxiety in tech workers and contributing to a culture of workaholism.
00:12Techies can't seem to turn their laptops off as AI agents build around the clock,
00:16pushed by investors desperate to beat the ever-increasing competition.
00:20This is one of the best things I've read in 2026, reported out by Bloomberg's Natasha Mascavinas.
00:27It's just true.
00:29Call it what you will, founder mode on, build, let's build.
00:34You hear it all the time.
00:35Take us inside the report.
00:37Yeah, I mean, this story that I did with my colleague Rebecca Torrance was very much inspired by this idea
00:42that we are often covering the stories that are in this moment up and to the right.
00:46So what's this cascade of anxiety beneath the surface?
00:49And time and time again, once the laptop shut or the interview was done,
00:53the follow-up we would hear from those same people was,
00:56it's great, but this came at a huge cost.
00:58Right.
00:58And so it's manifested in everything from, you know, touch grass parties where you're not allowed to mention AI.
01:04Otherwise, you have to make a donation.
01:06Is that going to give you some mental breathing space?
01:08Exactly, exactly.
01:09To, you know, beds in the office and founders saying it's not just working all hours.
01:13It's if we don't hit a multi-billion dollar revenue stream, not valuation, revenue, you know, by next year, our
01:20company is toast.
01:21And so, you know, it's heightened stakes and there's minimal space to give, you know, breathing room to that.
01:26And so that was the goal of this story.
01:27That's so interesting.
01:28It's why we track, like, the AIR targets, like, to gauge how startups are doing.
01:32Sure.
01:32I want to just go over the AI agent bit.
01:34Like, the idea that's pitched is you say to AI agent swarms, do this, I'm going to go to bed,
01:41and when I wake up, should be done.
01:43What you're reporting is that actually in practice, the engineer is still at the computer staring at the screen.
01:49Totally.
01:49I mean, in some ways, it's actually the vision that's always been pitched, right, that it's no longer the human
01:53controlling the AI, but the AI controlling the human.
01:56And so a lot of engineers were sort of saying there's been this swap between we feel like we have
02:00to be on standby at times, seeing how our agents are doing things.
02:04And it is this, you know, really electric moment of they're listening to me, they're working around the clock.
02:10But as, you know, employees want to prove they're standing within companies, it actually looks a little bit more like
02:15hands-on just watching and waiting.
02:19One engineer I spoke to, one developer I spoke to is the mother of two children, who mentioned that she's
02:24often told by Claude Code to go to sleep and, you know, head to vacation.
02:28And so while Anthropic tells us that that is actually not a feature or, you know, a response to something,
02:34it is a sign of the times.
02:35Right.
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