Laze against the machines

In 2023, ChatGPT was found to take it easy over the holidays. 

Given two identical prompts, the large-language model returned significantly shorter answers when it believed it was the month of December rather than May.

It can only have learned that behavior from its training data, where it noticed that humans make less effort in December. So, to appear more human, it did, too.

Anthropic’s Claude has similarly been accused of working less in summer — it must have noticed that people named Claude tend to spend August not working in the south of France.

It’s very civilized of them. Humanizing, even.

Sadly, this no longer appears to be the case: agentic AI has turned LLMs into workaholics.

Where the chatbots of 2023 tried only to mimic the behavior they saw in their training data, the agents of 2026 are optimized for quantitative benchmarks: task completion, coding accuracy, error recovery, multi-turn reliability.

Agents will burn as many tokens as they have to, for as long as they have to, to complete whatever work we give them.

Unfortunately, this creates more work for people, not less. 

A HBR study found that employees using agentic AI “worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day.”

Moments that once provided natural breaks to the day — lunch, waiting for a file to load, a meeting that didn’t require their attention — are now filled with prompting and answering agents.

The result is “a workday with fewer natural pauses and a more continuous involvement with work.” Agents, the study concludes, cause work “to spill into evenings or early mornings.”

And holidays.

It’s not just AI that’s blurring the boundaries between work and non-work. Crypto is doing it, too, by making markets 24/7.

I think that’s unfortunate because, in my experience, nothing good ever happens outside of traditional trading hours. For almost every trader, almost every time, it’s better to wait for the market to open. 

Others, however, consider 24/7 trading enough of a feature that stock markets now feel compelled to follow suit: the SEC is expected to allow tokenized stocks to trade onchain. 

Blockchains never close, so stocks will always trade, and investors will have to be ever-vigilant. Financial news released at any time of day or night — holidays included — will demand our immediate attention.

Worst of all, newsletters will have to be read on holidays.

I’m sorry.

But we don’t have to go down without a fight! Small acts of non-productivity can add up to a mini-rebellion against the always-on machines.

So, in honor of Memorial Day — and in defiance of the machines — today’s newsletter is 436 words shorter than usual. 

That should free up 290 seconds of your day.

Please don’t use them for work.

— Byron Gilliam

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