Humans are the bottleneck

Human attention is the binding constraint. About 80% of interactive agent session time is spent idle, waiting for a person. Reading all of the output from interactive sessions would take more than half the work week even for non-technical staff. One engineer compared it to babysitting, with every agent demanding attention at the same urgency.

Human coordination grew rather than shrank. Median meeting time is up 20%, and 16% even for technical individual contributors. Agents showed up in nearly half of public Slack channels but layered on top of human communication instead of replacing it. Decisions made privately are invisible to agents, so the workplace pushes toward doing work in the open.

Summarized by AI.

🔗 Anthropic Studies Itself: Junior Tech Hires Fall From 27% to 9% as Agents Log 6x Human Hours and Attention Becomes the Bottleneck