The AI Refactoring Tax: Automating broken processes at the speed of light.
The biggest risk to AI isn’t model safety. It’s the technical debt of the models it replaces.
We are automating the work. But nobody automated the scope.
A Berkeley/HBR study shows the shadow side: when starting a task becomes zero-friction, we start more of them. “Enjoyable experimentation” becomes invisible workload.
We removed the friction of doing. We didn’t remove the friction of deciding.
The result isn’t leisure. It’s drowning in potential. The bottleneck isn’t execution anymore. It’s taste.
And until we fix the scope creep, AI isn’t a productivity tool. It’s a burnout accelerator.
