A few weeks ago, I sat down with a colleague for our weekly 1-1. He came in visibly exhausted — not from a late night debugging, not from an incident. He'd been on vacation and had come back to four active Claude sessions waiting for him, each one pulling in a different direction. "I always told people not to do this". I'd heard this before. But sitting in that room, I realized we were looking at a new kind of developer fatigue — one that didn't exist two years ago. The New Speed Limit In 2023, developers were tired from staying up until 3am reading through StackOverflow for a two-line fix, or building entire features from scratch to satisfy a PM's request. That kind of exhaustion had a shape to it: deep, slow, earned. In 2026, the exhaustion looks different. It's not from doing too little — it's from doing too much, too fast. A new feature now takes three good lines of prompting. The bottleneck isn't execution anymore; it's context switching.…