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TL;DR
AI brain fry is the mental tiredness that comes from juggling lots of AI tools and agents at once, and it can hit the people who love AI the most.
Jake’s biggest fix is one assistant that briefs all his other agents, so he only has one conversation to keep up with.
He gets his assistant to show him before-and-after visuals instead of paragraphs, and he talks to it instead of typing.
He’s pulling back on automation on purpose, so he still knows his own projects inside out.
Get the full low down 👇
“This is all really cool, but I also hate it all at the same time.”Jake Bishop, Senior Product Designer, 3 Sided Cube
That’s Jake, six months into Cube going AI native. And he’s not even a sceptic having a moan. He saves every new trick that crosses his feed (somewhere between the snowboarding and skydiving videos) and tries it himself. When Duncan announced we were rebuilding the whole agency, Jake barely blinked. It felt like old news, because he’d been doing a home-made version of it for ages.
He’s so far in, you’d think he birthed Claude himself.
“I love Claude. Claude is like my baby.”Jake Bishop, Senior Claude Parent
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So when someone who loves AI this much says it’s leaving him wiped out, it’s worth listening. Researchers even gave it a name this year: AI brain fry. Jake didn’t know it had a name. He just knew his brain was struggling, so he did something about it. Here’s what he’s done to gird his brains.
Why running AI agents fries your brain
Agents work best when you’ve got lots of jobs on the go at once, so Jake runs lots of them. The catch is that every time he hops from one to the next, he has to re-onboard himself. What was this one doing again? Where did we leave it?
Then there’s the reading. Hours of “conversational reading” in tiny chat windows turn out to be way more tiring than pushing things around a big Figma canvas. Even his eyes feel it.
“I feel way more exhausted mentally from work.”Jake Bishop, Senior Product Designer, 3 Sided Cube
That’s the bit that never makes it into the productivity posts on LinkedIn. You get more done, and your brain does more context switching than ever to keep up. By the end of the day, your eyes have gone square and you’re just staring at a wall.
So Jake did what designers do with any annoying problem. He redesigned it.
Get one assistant to boss the others
Jake’s first fix was to stop talking to everything. Now he talks to one assistant. It knows his projects, his workflows and his notes, and it briefs the other agents to go and do the work (spinning up new ones when it needs to).
If the work comes back not quite right, he asks for a few options, picks the best bits and lets it mash them together. Only then does he step in by hand.
It’s hooked up to Slack, too. Recently, Jake asked a fellow Cube a question so he could feed the answer back to his assistant. The assistant spotted the reply first and just carried on with the task. Jake didn’t have to say a word.
That’s the dream for him: a proper assistant (his words: “a minion”) that takes the boring documentation side off his plate. One conversation to keep up with, instead of a whole group chat full of bots.
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Make it show you, not tell you
Agents love a wall of text. Jake does not.
“It used to be like, ‘Yeah, I did this’, and then five freaking paragraphs of what it did… Just show me what you’ve done.”Jake Bishop, Senior Product Designer, 3 Sided Cube
So now it does. Instead of paragraphs about what changed in his Figma files, Jake gets before-and-after slider widgets, and one glance tells him what happened. His assistant does the same with the other agents’ replies, boiling their big messages down so he never has to wade through them.
Talk, don’t type (and step away from the screen)
Typing is the next thing Jake’s cut back on.
“Who does typing anymore?”Jake Bishop, Senior Product Designer, 3 Sided Cube
He talks to his assistant instead. That means fewer words to read, fewer to write and less squinting at a screen. When he can, he gets away from screens entirely.
That last one sounds obvious, but it’s the one most of us skip when there are six agents waiting on a reply. It’s also something our Head of People, Emillie, keeps a close eye on across Cube. She went full Gandalf about it in You shall not pass, AI.
Protect what’s in your head (tinfoil hat optional)
The sneakier side effect of handing so much over to the bots? Less of the project lives in your own brain. That’s brilliant for juggling lots of work, but it can leave you a step removed from the detail.
“It feels like I’m losing a bit of the knowledge that should be in my head rather than with AI.”Jake Bishop, Senior Product Designer, 3 Sided Cube
So Jake’s pulling back on purpose, looking for the line between the speed it gives him and automating “too much”. Where exactly does that line sit? He hasn’t found it yet, but he’s looking.
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Spend the headspace on the fun stuff
Get the brain fry under control and the time you save is yours to play with.
Jake has drawn the map for one particular festival three times now, building curved lines out of teeny tiny straight ones, one click at a time. This year, he built his own tool for it instead. A row of trees? Done. A path? Done. Curved lines that are actually curved? Finally.
He’s also built a save-the-date website for his wedding next year. Every guest gets their own version with their name and a little animation, and there’s a CMS (content management system) behind it so Jake and his partner can keep track of who’s coming. He reckons it’s unlocked a part of his creative brain he couldn’t get to before.
So, would Jake go back?
If we had a big red button that took us back to March 2026, would he press it? He’s not sure.
“I love it, but I don’t know if I should love it as much as I love it.”Jake Bishop, Senior Product Designer, 3 Sided Cube
He misses the slower pace of thinking a task through properly. But he’s not pressing the button. He’s just getting smarter about how he uses it. No tinfoil hat needed, then. Just fewer paragraphs and the odd walk away from the screen.
Straight from the Cubes
Want more of the low-down on how the Factory Rebuild has gone across the teams at Cube? Get the stories straight from the Cubes and catch up here:
You shall not pass, AI: meet the Gandalf of our Factory Rebuild
How a marketing team goes AI native (in an office full of developers)
Questions clients really ask when their software agency goes AI native
No code, no problem: how our Support team built their own AI tools
Everything is awesome? A developer's honest take on going AI native
Will AI take the fun out of design? Our product designer's honest playbook
Disclaimer: We used AI in the process of writing this blog, but a human was still at the centre! We'd be poor advocates for going AI native if we didn't use AI to help write about it. The story is ours, the quotes are our team's own words, and every line got the human pass 💚
FAQs
What is AI brain fry?
AI brain fry is the mental exhaustion that comes from using lots of AI tools or agents at once. The constant context switching and reading long AI replies in small chat windows can leave you more tired than hands-on work, even when you’re getting more done.
How do you beat AI brain fry when you’re running lots of AI agents?
Cut down how many conversations you have to keep up with. One assistant that briefs your other agents, before-and-after visuals instead of long text replies, talking instead of typing and proper screen breaks all help. Jake also limits how much he automates, so he keeps project knowledge in his own head.
Can you love AI and still get AI brain fry?
Yes. Jake is one of the biggest AI fans at Cube (Claude is “like my baby”) and he still finds running agents more mentally tiring than design ever was.
Published on 6 November 2026, last updated on 6 November 2026