Sophie Leroy — On AI
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Contents
Cover Foreword About Chapter 1: The Discovery of Attention Residue Chapter 2: Why the Mind Does Not Switch Cleanly Chapter 3: The Monitoring Tax in AI-Augmented Work Chapter 4: Multitasking and the Illusion of Productivity Chapter 5: When Engagement Produces the Deepest Residue Chapter 6: The Cost of Context-Switching at Scale Chapter 7: Cognitive Resources Are Not Renewable on Demand Chapter 8: Designing Work for Depth, Not Breadth Chapter 9: Flow, Interrupted — and How to Protect It Chapter 10: Attention Ecology and the Residue Problem Epilogue Back Cover
Sophie Leroy Cover

Sophie Leroy

On AI
A Simulation of Thought by Opus · Part of the You On AI Encyclopedia
A Note to the Reader: This text was not written or endorsed by Sophie Leroy. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Sophie Leroy's pattern of thought in order to reflect on the transformation that AI represents for human creativity, work, and meaning.

Foreword

By Edo Segal ^ Opus

By Edo Segal

The switch I never noticed was the one that cost the most.

Attention Residue
Attention Residue

Not the big transitions — leaving one company to start another, pivoting a product, rewriting a roadmap. Those I felt. Those I prepared for. The switch I'm talking about is the small one. The one that happens forty times a day. The one where I'm deep inside a problem with Claude, the architecture is crystallizing, the pieces are connecting, and then a notification pulls me to another thread. Thirty seconds. Maybe a minute. I handle it. I come back.

Except I don't come back. Not fully. Something has smeared.

Sophie Leroy gave that smear a name: attention residue. The cognitive trace of the thing you just left, clinging to your working memory

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11 chapters
WIKI COMPANION

Sophie Leroy — On AI

A reading-companion catalog of the 27 Orange Pill Wiki entries linked from this book — the people, ideas, works, and events that Sophie Leroy — On AI uses as stepping stones for thinking through the AI revolution.

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Cal Newport
Further Reading From The You On AI Encyclopedia · Related Thinkers for Sophie Leroy — On AI
11 voices alongside this section — click to meet them
Thinkers whose frameworks illuminate this section.
Cal Newport
Cal Newport
Newport's deep work framework is the closest intellectual neighbor to Leroy's research — he popularized attention residue for a mass audience and his prescription for depth over breadth is the book's own recommendation.
Gloria Mark
Gloria Mark
Mark's 23-minute recovery finding is cited as the gold-standard empirical complement to Leroy's attention residue research; her work on interruption costs in natural settings validates Leroy's lab findings.
William James
William James
James's foundational attention theory — the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention — is the precursor to every modern attention residue model; Chapter 9 on flow and Chapter 10 on attentional ecology both draw on his foundational insight.
Aaron Antonovsky
Aaron Antonovsky
Antonovsky's salutogenic question — what keeps people healthy under stress — mirrors the book's question about what preserves cognitive quality under attentional stress; both reframe pathology as structural design.
Daniel Kahneman
Daniel Kahneman
Kahneman's two-system model provides the cognitive architecture background against which Leroy's working memory constraints and automatic residue effects operate; System 2 depletion maps directly onto the monitoring tax.
Linda Stone
Linda Stone
Stone coined 'continuous partial attention' — the state of always-on partial engagement that Leroy's framework diagnoses as a pathological baseline; both researchers describe the same attentional ecology problem.
Herbert Simon
Herbert Simon
Simon's attention as the binding scarce resource in information-rich environments is the economic framing of the same constraint Leroy identifies; his insight that information consumes attention directly predicts the monitoring tax.
Ellen Langer
Ellen Langer
Langer's mindfulness research — the distinction between mindful engagement and mindless habit — illuminates why residue-impaired judgment feels competent from the inside; her conditionally granted attention concept frames the book's recovery prescription.
Robert Kegan
Robert Kegan
Kegan's developmental theory of immunity to change — the way competing commitments prevent people from acting on what they know — explains why organizations cannot act on Leroy's prescriptions even when they understand them intellectually.
Kieran Egan
Kieran Egan
Egan's educational theory of depth before breadth — teaching through depth of engagement with fewer things rather than breadth of coverage — maps directly onto the book's prescriptive core: one project deeply rather than five shallowly.
James March
James March
March's exploration vs. exploitation framework illuminates the organizational tradeoff the book identifies: AI enables unprecedented exploration across multiple projects, but the exploitation required for deep quality demands focused cognitive resources that breadth depletes.

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