My team is building an AI content production tool on top of Claude and it’s truly wonderful. Vibe coding helps us make updates to the tool in hours, and this week alone there were two HUGE updates we made that in a previous life I would have celebrated for a full week.
Instead, there were mere moments in my week, and then I was off to the next thing.
That is becoming more and more common for my teams. We have increased content output at least 120% each quarter for the last two years. We have seen massive gains in our AIO placements, AEO citations, and even non-branded organic traffic back to site (which is merely directional now, since our halo effect hits direct and paid search traffic, too.) We’ve built incredible content workflows, learned new types of editing (because AI says weird shit), globalized our work, and built tools and technical capabilities I never thought were going to be super useful in my editorial career (but thank goodness coding, and computer science, and understanding the how behind all things tech interests me so much, because WOW have I leaned hard on that).
And yet, and yet!! We don’t celebrate these wins often. There is always more to do, sure. But I find myself needing more time “touching grass” as they say––which is often just laying on my bed not thinking for a few minutes during the work day.
I’m coming to call this AI jet lag. Similar to how we can get half-way around the world faster than ever, and still, our physical bodies need time to adjust, AI efficiency may speed us up, but we are still humans after all. Understanding how these systems work, what they’ve produced, and applying our physical human brains to the assets created and updating the skills and workflows that created them is taxing. It is the task of human-in-the-lead with AI (which I wrote about last week). And even as AI gets faster and faster, humans have a physical capacity.
It’s our AI jet lag.
Our brains need to think, to process, and to rest. This means that not all time saved by AI efficiencies should be put to new tasks or new work, even if you are only looking at this from a capitalist view. Humans, which build, lead, and optimize the AI systems, are not machines. Our brains experience real AI jet lag that must be addressed. It’s a physical symptom of the human body. Rest is required in order to make up for the speed.
I think this is new. Not just for the AI era, but for 2026 in general as AI models have gotten good enough to do, well, a lot of things. And as those models get better and better, I imagine more and more folks will feel this, too. Our limits on capacity––not just the additional work and tasks we could do because AI helps us move faster, but our limit on productivity, and the need for rest to properly lead the machines.
It’s no wonder “touch grass” has become such a popular internet meme. It's hitting on something far more difficult to name, which is that humans have needs as well as limits. And if humans are to lead in the AI era, we have to rethink work to make sure AI jet lag is properly addressed and managed.
Have you experienced it?
