Over the past six months, every software engineer adopted AI coding assistants. Tools like Cursor, Copilot, and Claude Code allow us to produce code five times faster than we did two years ago.

Yet almost every tech lead and senior developer I speak with feels more exhausted by three in the afternoon than ever before.

The problem is not the code generation. The problem is cognitive review thrashing.

The AI Bandwidth Paradox

Before AI assistants, the bottleneck in software development was typing speed and syntax recall. You spent thirty minutes thinking through a problem, and fifteen minutes writing the implementation.…