When do you realize you have spent more time managing your AI tools than using them?

There's a specific phase and I think a lot of people are in it right now without realizing it.

You've added enough AI to your workflow that the maintenance cost starts eating into the time you were trying to save.

Updating prompts when outputs drift. Re-explaining context at the start of every session because nothing carries over.

Reconnecting integrations that broke. Checking outputs because you're not sure what the tool actually did.

I hit this wall about six months ago. I had five AI tools that were each good at one thing, and I was the glue holding them together. The admin of managing the stack had become its own job.

The thing that shifted it for me wasn't switching tools. It was getting more selective about which tools were actually grounded in my real context versus which ones needed me to re-explain everything every time.

I'm curious how others navigated this. Did you consolidate? Did you find a better workflow? Or did you just learn to live with the overhead?