Feeling productive is not being productive.

Two sentences, no study, no numbers. Shihipar did not say agents are useless. He said a certain way of using them can feel like progress without being progress 2. India Today reported the post on 30 October and noted he did not give a public reason for leaving Anthropic 1.

He is not alone in describing the pull. India Today also recalled Andrej Karpathy saying on the No Priors podcast that he was in a state of psychosis while working with agents: “I’m just like in the state of psychosis of trying to figure out what’s possible, trying to push it to the limit” 1.

Developer Peter Steinberger put the other side plainly in an interview quoted by The Deep View: “If you don’t ask the right questions, it’s still going to be slop.” 3

Microsoft has been testing this inside its own company. Kathleen Hogan, its chief strategy and transformation officer, wrote that the company “learned that access and usage do not equal transformation” 4.

Adding agents to a broken process still leaves a broken process

Kathleen Hogan, Microsoft 4

She added that “speeding up one step just creates a longer queue at the next” 4. In other words, more agents running is a measure of activity. It says nothing yet about what got finished.

Microsoft’s own answer was to start from the business outcome rather than from the tool, and to track leading indicators until results show up 4. For an engineer, Hogan wrote, the measure “is not how much code AI produces, but whether the team is building better products faster” 4.