AI is making us faster, more productive, and worse at thinking

AI is everywhere, the pressure to adopt it is relentless, and the evidence that it’s making us smarter is getting thinner by the quarter.

On New Year’s Day 2026, a programmer named Steve Yegge launched an open-source platform called Gas Town. It lets users orchestrate swarms of AI coding agents simultaneously, assembling software at speeds no single human could match.

One of the first people to try it described the experience in terms that had nothing to do with productivity. “There’s really too much going on for you to comprehend reasonably,” he wrote. “I had a palpable sense of stress watching it.”

That sentence should be pinned to the wall of every executive suite, every venture capital boardroom, and every CES keynote stage where the word “intelligence” is thrown around like confetti. Because something strange is happening in the relationship between humans and the technology we keep ...