FOMAT

FOMAT stands for Fear of Missing Agent Time: the worry that AI agents could be doing useful work while their user is sleeping, resting or occupied elsewhere. The term applies especially to coding agents that can continue a task without constant prompting. Michael Richman used it in an April 2026 conference talk. It is informal developer slang, rather than a medical diagnosis or productivity metric. A session can be working, waiting for a decision or deliberately stopped; keeping it active does not establish that its output is valuable. The concept highlights the human attention needed to supervise agentic AI.