I’ve long worked in organizations with engineers spread around the globe. It’s common to wake up to PRs, incidents, emails, DMs, etc. from colleagues working where the sun rises long before it does where I live. There’s a certain amount of mental and comprehension overload that happens with that setup.

Do I need to jump in and work on any of these things? Which of them takes priority? Will I be helping or just adding noise to the work in progress? Now, we’ve added a new player into this and ,in some cases, it’s a challenge of my own making.

The"night shift" agent seems like a true boon on the surface. It can do what I ask it do while I sleep. I wake up and find entire new features built, tested, and documented. That’s an amazing productivity boost. It’s almost like having two days of work in a single day. This is amazing. Think of all the things we can get done that we never had time for before.

There’s a catch, though. There’s always a catch. The review and comprehension burden that agents have already created for us has now doubled. In this case, we don’t even have the benefit of having watched or interacted as the solution was put together. No chance to redirect the agent or stop it if we see it going astray. It’s just a massive blob of code that we need to understand, troubleshoot, test, and be able to justify to our colleagues and our customers.

We haven’t even considered the opportunity cost of that “fresh eyes” moment that many of us have in the mornings. We wake up with a new perspective on that little nagging concern about yesterday’s work. We open the editor and we see a new, better way to get it done. Where is the space for that when the PR from the agent waits for our approval? Why fiddle with yesterday’s thing that’s “probably good enough” when there’s a whole new thing that’s “already done”?

This feels like a ripe setup for burnout. It feels like a trap for unintended consequences. It feels untenable.

I don’t typically work like this but I know quite a few engineers who do. I don’t worry about the quality of their work because they are good engineers, great engineers even, and I know they’ll ensure the work is up to snuff. I do worry about their happiness, their fulfillment, their joy of having solved a hard problem with a craft they’ve honed over the years. This fear isn’t new because of “night shift” agentic work but that expectation does seem like one more facet being carved into what is quickly becoming a fractured line of work.