Written & drawn by a human called Ajay • Minimal edits via AI • 386 words
To Ryan, Gerard, Matt and others who replied that the brain fry from AI really hit home.
I asked Claude how I’d been using it over the last month and here’s what it told me:
3B tokens used, API equivalent of $9.1k, 30 active days out of 30, 124 sessions, 1,365 prompts.
Claude analyzing how I use it
Not trying to flex here 😏
But seriously, this is just a normal usage amount - I’m sure some people have far far higher stats. But this is the equivalent of making almost 1,400 decisions in a month and providing directives. It’s exhausting.
I genuinely feel exhausted around 10am and that’s when the rest of the office is coming in. I told multiple people that I planned to work on some critical work at 2pm - and I just couldn’t do it. So I had to wait until the next morning.
And here’s the real thing - it’s not the 1,400 decisions that fry you. It’s jumping between them. I’m brain frying because I’m parallelising so much work and the switching cost between every tab and session is costing me. It FEELS like I’m working so hard by multithreading a lot but I think it’s making me far less efficient. It’s just performative.
So here are 3 things I’m fixing this week and it’s already helped:
Close the loops. The dozens of projects I leave half-finished, still running in my head really weigh me down. I leave so many terminal tabs open to come back to - I’m finishing or closing them asap
Do less in parallel. Being able to run ten at once doesn't mean I should so I cap it at three tabs and race to close one fast.
And stop being the RAM. I've held all the context in my own head so now I’m just handing stuff off. Saving more .md files / notion documents, labelling terminals etc.
I hope this helps you stop being a performative AI user that flaunts 10 tabs and helps you stare out of the window because it’s nice outside not because you feel so brain fried you have to.
Until next time,
Ajay
P.S Some other interesting Claude usage stats if you’re curious
