One night, last January, 4:36am.
I'm in bed, open my laptop, click "Approve", go back to sleep before my alarm rings at 6am.
As I doze off, Claude goes back into another loop of planning, building, checking, testing and deploying. And really, I wasn't sleeping that well in January.
I'd launch a task on Claude, convinced I'd delegated the legwork to AI. But it was a rotten deal: all the time AI promised to free up really meant idle supervision. I was on call. I was on call for Claude Code.
I was deep in validation fatigue. Later that month I closed my laptop one day, and didn't open it again for another few days. I'd been burned out by AI.
While I don't recommend the full-blown approve-everything experience, I give coaching clients a controlled taste of this fatigue as they ramp up on Claude. Purposeful friction slowly builds clarity in what Claude does, where the stakes are, and where it needs a human.
In the words of Leonardo: "wisdom is the daughter of experience."
I make sure this "experience" is brief, as we quickly set the cursor of what you delegate without asking (reading an email) and what you don't (deleting anything). And where to set this cursor isn't obvious, because it requires foresight. And yet, no matter how predictable your day-to-day, "the average expert was roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee" (Tetlock. Yep, 2-quote post).
Want this running in your team?
evoilabs starts with one task, the one your team repeats every week, and builds the system that handles it. Then your team builds the next one.
See how it works →Colin Jones recently shared that his wife used Muse to build a family dinner system. Approvals don't even come up. As Colin puts it: "Builders ask: what can I make? Everyone else asks: can you just handle this?" There will always be room for the tinkerers. Everyone else just wants it handled: the groceries, the kids to practice on time, that text, that dinner booking, that updated reporting dashboard.
So if you've set up Claude and you're still approving every single task, that's a symptom. Ask yourself this: what's one thing your agent still asks you to approve that it shouldn't?