White Knuckles on the Wheel
You know that feeling in a self-driving car?
Hands off the wheel. Eyes wide open. Muscles tensed.
Hyper-alert. Waiting for the split-second the machine mistakes a shadow for a truck.
That’s coding now.
I’m not using a tool.
I’m supervising a high-speed entity.
Passive Vigilance
Psychologists have known for decades: “passive vigilance” is one of the most draining cognitive states.
Lifeguards rotate every hour.
Pilots are exhausted after flights where they barely touched the controls.
Watching for an error that might happen is infinitely more taxing than fixing an error that just happened.
When I write code: I’m in flow. I’m the actor.
When the agent writes code: I’m the critic. The guard.
And the agent writes fast.
The 10-Second Review
The agent proposes a change to the auth flow.
Looks correct. Syntax is right. Variable names match. Compiles.
But is it right?
Did it handle the edge case where the token is expired but the refresh token is valid and the network is flaky?
I don’t know.
I didn’t write it. I don’t have the mental model loaded.
I have to:
- Read the code
- Reverse-engineer the intent
- Build the mental model from scratch
- Verify the logic
All in 10 seconds before I click “Approve.”
The Rubber Stamp
The temptation is always there.
“LGTM.”
The code is clean. The agent is confident. Tests passed.
Why not just accept it?
Because I’ve been burned.
I’ve seen the agent import a library with a known CVE.
I’ve seen it implement a retry loop that accidentally DDOS-ed our own API.
The mistakes are rare. That’s the problem.
Wrong 50% of the time? I’d check everything.
Wrong 1% of the time? I’d check nothing and rely on QA.
But the agent lives in the Uncanny Valley—wrong maybe 10% of the time.
Just enough to be dangerous.
Just enough that I must check everything.
Just rare enough that I get complacent.
The New Exhaustion
I finish a day with Antigravity and I’m wiped out.
My hands don’t hurt. I haven’t typed much.
But my brain is fried.
8 hours holding the wheel of a car going 200mph, waiting for it to swerve.
This is the trade-off:
We traded manual labor for mental load.
We traded typing for vigilance.
We’re productive. Incredibly so.
But we’re also white-knuckled, staring at the screen, terrified that if we blink, the machine will ship a bug we won’t understand until next week.