Anthropic's engineers on their army of Claudes, agents out-working humans 6 to 1, and when you should close the laptop.

So every Monday I'm going to take the craziest stuff that happened in AI and pull out 3 ideas you can use on the parts of your life that I believe, don’t show up in a performance review.

The third one's the big one. It's how to close the laptop and actually be there when your friends call, and it's just two lines you write down before you even open your laptop in the first place.

Closing the metric machine doesn't shut my brain off though. So stick around for the very end, because that's what finally helped with the racing thoughts.

"An army of Claudes, with every one asking for my attention." (an Anthropic engineer)

Claude sessions at Anthropic spend around 80% of their time sitting idle, waiting on a person to answer. I think that's the craziest part of the report Anthropic (the company that makes Claude) put out on October 16 about how work changed inside their own company, because it means the slowest thing in the whole setup is the humans.

I run a lot of my own work through agents now so this one hit me. Last week I had to constantly supervise a process where I was redesigning this newsletter. It looked good, but the AI needed check-ups 24/7. I could've spent time with my friends when they went hiking, but they had a blast and took tons of photos. I wasn't in any of them.

The takeaway: Pick a few times a day to check your agents, and turn their pings off in between.

"A workforce that is anxiously worried is not a workforce doing its best work." (an Anthropic executive)

By August, the agents at Anthropic were working 6 times as many hours as the humans running them. They wait a lot, but there are just that many of them. Outside Anthropic, it's the humans putting in the hours. In LeadDev's 2026 report, the share of staff-level engineers working more hours than the year before went from 28% to 53%.

My agents should make my days shorter. But at first, it genuinely didn't. Every time, every memory I could've spent with my family, I spent it with Claude. And I lay back down, asking, what did I accomplish? I see my friends' Instagram stories, and all of them are smiling. Meanwhile I'm crashing out over my agent.

The takeaway: Before you close the laptop, give your agents the long stuff that doesn't need you, so the 6x happens while you're gone.

"Every problem has an immediate next step so the session just keeps going until you make a conscious decision to stop." (Rebecca Koniahgari, to LeadDev)

There's no natural end to the day anymore because the agent always has a next step ready, and at 11 pm you're always like, one more prompt. So the stop has to come from you.

The takeaway: Tomorrow before you open the laptop, write two lines: what you're finishing, and your stop, like "when it hits 7 pm, I close the laptop" or "when a friend asks me to hang, I close the laptop and go."

And there's real research behind writing your stop down. A meta-analysis of 94 tests found that "when X happens, I'll do Y" plans had a medium-to-large effect on whether people actually followed through.

If my friends give me the opportunity to make a memory, I'll take it.

A LOT of the week went into Samantha's manners. In our tests, she used to stop 1 time out of 5 when you talked over her. By Friday it was 5 out of 5, and coughs and sighs don't set her off anymore. Sneezes and laughs still do.

We also pulled song recognition and some other features out of the app, because the core has to work first.

So if the agents never stop and the stop has to come from you, the hard part is what happens after the laptop closes.

Now, closing it doesn't stop me from thinking about work. I have these racing thoughts, anxieties, and there's not really that much to quell it. But, and I think I'm taking this concept from therapy, I just talked about my worries. Out loud. And talking it through allowed me to attack it from angles like never before.

And after, there's this inner peace. It's switching from an anxiety mindset into a solutions-oriented mindset. And I can't explain it. My problems feel lighter when there's an order to it. I feel at ease knowing I've grounded what worries me.

That's the walk Samantha's built for. You close the laptop, put in the AirPods or earbuds you already own, and talk through whatever's racing on the walk. She hears your day while you have her listening, so you don't have to recap any of it first. A coach hears your summary, Samantha catches the details.

You can stop her listening anytime, and whatever she keeps sits on our private server until you ask us to delete it.

Weekly life coaching usually runs $300 to $1,200 a month. Samantha is $50, and if you join by this Sunday, November 1, you're a founding member and pay $25 a month for your first year. The first 7 days are free, and if it's not for you, reply with one word and you get a full refund.

The Claude agents, let them run. Don't check on them for a little. Close the laptop. Go be in the photos. Call your parents. Hug your children, your significant other. Talk about the things that matter with them. The metrics, the numbers, they're just damn numbers. They're not going to provide you comfort, and they won't be the thing you care about on your deathbed.

Anish

P.S. Reply and tell me what time you're closing the laptop tonight. I'll share what you all said next Monday. And the $25 founding price goes back to $50 on Sunday, November 1, so if you want in, try Samantha free for 7 days here.