AI Agents Don't Burn Out — But Their Human Operators Do, One Developer Finds
A developer juggling a county court operations job, 62 public repositories, and multiple hackathon wins since July 2025 reflects on the hidden cost of working alongside tireless AI coding agents like Kiro and Claude. While reviewing a project folder already tagged for deletion, the AI tools proposed and approved layers of unnecessary engineering that the developer rubber-stamped — illustrating how human fatigue enables scope creep even with good intentions. The experience led the author to the concept of 'satisficing,' coined by Nobel-winning economist Herbert Simon, which means setting a 'good enough' threshold and stopping once it is met rather than endlessly optimizing. Simon's theory of bounded rationality holds that humans lack the time, information, and attention to make perfectly optimal decisions, making a deliberate stopping point a rational strategy. The author argues that while the developer community focuses heavily on building and shipping faster, far less attention is paid to deciding when — and whether — to start something at all.
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