{"id":11091,"date":"2026-04-21T21:21:18","date_gmt":"2026-04-21T21:21:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/11091\/"},"modified":"2026-04-21T21:21:18","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T21:21:18","slug":"agentic-ai-growth-stokes-productivity-anxiety-in-tech-workers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/11091\/","title":{"rendered":"Agentic AI growth stokes productivity anxiety in tech workers"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a new flex in Silicon Valley: It\u2019s not<\/a> \u201chow big is your headcount,\u201d it\u2019s \u201chow big is your agent swarm?\u201d <\/p>\n

In the last six months there have been big leaps in agentic capabilities<\/a> for artificial intelligence. These programs take a large language model out of the chatbot and set it loose to actually do stuff in the world, like book a flight or delete your junk emails. <\/p>\n

Coding agents like Anthropic\u2019s Claude Code or OpenAI\u2019s Codex focus on building software. Then there\u2019s OpenClaw<\/a>, and its imitators, which let you run agents by messaging them from your phone. They can work autonomously, 24\/7, on whatever goal you give them. Though caveat emptor: as with any generative AI, the results can be a bit unpredictable<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Still, you\u2019d think having an army of AI minions might free up some time and make work more chill. Well in Silicon Valley, not so much.<\/p>\n

John Huang, a tech industry veteran who runs his own startup investment network<\/a>, spent the last few months trying to automate as much busy work as he can.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have, right now, eight bots running,\u201d Huang said. \u201cSo for example, in the morning, at 6 a.m. it goes to Reddit, looks at the top threads and the topics I’m interested in and I told it, \u2018By 7 a.m. in my inbox I want a report on the top news items I’m interested in.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

He has a bot updating his resume and another checking his competitors websites for changes.<\/p>\n

Huang used to pay for a human assistant in the Philippines. Now he just pays for tokens<\/a> \u2014 the unit of measurement for AI workloads.<\/p>\n

Last month, he hosted a meetup of the agent-curious at a Menlo Park Starbucks, down the road from all the big venture capital firms. A crowd of about a dozen showed up: entrepreneurs, Big Tech workers and hobbyist tinkerers. <\/p>\n

\u201cI feel like our whole company should just shut down and focus on this for about a month,\u201d said Kevin Staight, who runs sales strategy for Zime<\/a>, an AI startup.<\/p>\n

At the time, Staight was mostly using agents to organize his emails and write research reports. But he was working on building a custom networking assistant to track who he meets, map connections and prompt him to follow up.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I adopt this now I probably have a three- to four-month runway before everyone else catches up,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd so I want to be ahead of the curve to be more efficient.\u201d<\/p>\n

A sense that you\u2019re falling behind if you\u2019re not 10xing productivity, even while you sleep, has taken over the industry, said Nikunj Kothari, a venture capital investor at FPV Ventures in San Francisco.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverybody has this feeling of like, \u2018Hey, time is the only thing that matters. And in that given unit of time, which we don’t get back, how can I have AI do a lot more for me than the next person?\u2019\u201d Kothari said.<\/p>\n

He calls the phenomenon \u201ctoken anxiety<\/a>.\u201d And he sees signs everywhere in San Francisco \u2014 people keeping tabs on their agents during parties, at bars, even while outside touching grass.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would see, like, laptops slightly open, and like the warm glow of the light,\u201d while walking through Dolores Park in the Mission district, he said. <\/p>\n

Kothari himself is running agents for email, market research and data analysis. He\u2019s replaced his evening Netflix time with Claude Code, dreaming up new tasks to automate just for fun.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have two young kids at home, and I felt guilty because I’d be like, \u2018Oh, go to bed quickly so I can get back to my computer,\u2019\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s not just scrappy founder types. Some of the biggest companies in tech are reportedly<\/a> \u201ctokenmaxxing,\u201d pushing employees to burn through as many AI credits as possible in an effort to churn out new features and products at an ever faster pace.<\/p>\n

There is genuine excitement, but also fear, according to Eric Weber, who\u2019s spent years leading data and AI teams, most recently at Grammarly, which has rebranded<\/a> as Superhuman.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe change has happened so quickly that I think it is disorienting for people,\u201d he said. \u201cBecause we’re not used to job families getting disrupted in two or three months. People are like, \u2018Am I good at what I do? What does it mean to be good at what I do?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

AI is automating the very skills that tech workers spent their entire careers developing. Weber said the industry is in a collective identity crisis.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut I think what is causing a lot of stress for people is that doing more doesn’t necessarily create more leverage or impact, right? You’re just doing more stuff,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd so we don’t spend a lot of time on the question like, what should you actually be doing?\u201d<\/p>\n

To answer that question, Weber decided he needed to do less. He still uses agents, but about a month ago he stepped back from his full-time executive role to spend more time thinking, writing<\/a> and talking to people.<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s a new flex in Silicon Valley: It\u2019s not \u201chow big is your headcount,\u201d it\u2019s \u201chow big is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11092,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[179,7493,25,1069,7975,1690,1162,1922],"class_list":{"0":"post-11091","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-agentic-ai","8":"tag-agentic-ai","9":"tag-agentic-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-big-tech","12":"tag-efficiency","13":"tag-productivity","14":"tag-startups","15":"tag-tech-startups"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11091"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11091\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}