CONCEPT
Judgment Fatigue
The progressive degradation of evaluative quality that occurs when AI-augmented work demands continuous higher-order reasoning without the rest intervals that the pre-AI workflow naturally provided.
Judgment fatigue is
Aza Raskin’s name for the specific cognitive exhaustion produced not by the quantity of work but by its changed architecture. Before
large language models handled implementation, a knowledge worker's day alternated between peaks of demanding evaluation — design choices, architectural decisions, editorial judgment — and valleys of routine execution that, while effortful in their own way, did not require the same quality of evaluative attention. The valleys were cognitive rest. AI eliminates the valleys. What remains is continuous judgment: the engineer evaluating AI-generated code, the writer assessing AI-generated prose, the analyst directing AI-generated analysis, all exercising their highest-order cognitive processes without interruption. The resource being consumed is
the capacity for critical evaluation itself, which depletes under sustained use and requires time of a different quality to restore. The symptom Raskin identifies most precisely is the acceptance of
plausible output — material that sounds right, reads authoritatively, and is wrong in ways that only deep evaluative attention, already depleted, would have caught. Judgment fatigue is thus self-concealing: the capacity