AI Is Making Us Work More
224 comments
·October 21, 2025everdrive
BeetleB
My first engineering job was non-SW, and had a lot of manual work. I automated a lot of it.
Yes, it led to more work. What would take half a day could now be done in an hour. So we now had to produce 4x more.
I spent 4 years there automating left and right. Everyone silently hated me. One of the problems with my automation was that it allowed for more and more Q/A. And the more you check for quality issues, the more issues you'll find. Suddenly we needed to achieve 4x more, and that meant finding 4x more problems. The thing about automation is that it doesn't speed up debugging time. This leads to more stress.
One senior guy took me aside and said management would not reward me for my efforts, but will get the benefit of all my work.
He was right.
Eventually, I left because I automate things to make my life easier. If it's not making my life easier (or getting me more money), why should I do it?
Since then, whenever I get a new job, I test the waters. If the outcome is like that first job, I stop working on process improvements, and look for another job.
abraae
I read a great article a while ago (can't remember where) when they tasked some embedded guys with building a somewhat complex front end app.
When it was done, there were no bugs. Not a single issue. They asked the embedded guys how they had accomplished it. They said "we didn't know bugs were allowed".
Many people have never authored or even been involved with a high quality piece of software, so they just don't know what it looks like, or why you'd want it.
You'd think that someone in the exec team would have some personal pride and ownership in the code and would want to flush out bugs and improve quality. But nah.
daheza
This nails so much of my frustration with software development at the moment.
The requests to my team are:
build what product says
close out 90% of the defects you find by priority order
deliver in the priority of feature > security > accessibility
once delivered move on to something else we only have time to work for 3 months on an initiative before we move on
These requirements don't end up with a well working product. They end up with gaps in product, defects that are obvious, non-accessible site. Things take time to polish and be made right, but that's not what is requested. Wanting to iterate and measure isn't important because its not more features.
unloader6118
Honestly, firmware is usually where we find the worse kind of bugs.
EGreg
One would think that machines and automation would be the perfect thing to catch bugs.
We already do that on many levels -- compilers, linters, pre-commit hooks etc. Well, AI can just red-team and create new tests. The great thing about red-teaming vs blue teaming is that false positive and hallucinations don't hurt the final product. So you can let it go wild.
nonethewiser
This is just the reality of scaling. Largely but not necessarily automation. Think of customer service now compared to early 2000s. Thats not really a story of automation. Instead, it's a story of 1) outsourcing 2) a bit of legitimate self service options (automation) and 3) abandonment - they simply stopped supporting at a good level. Quality is much worse but throughput is much higher - a necessary evil to scale.
AI actually has some ability to improve things. At least when I think about manufacturing and farming. When you produced at such a massive scale you could never individually inspect every potato, widget, or target every weed etc. You could produce WAAAY more but more bad products went out the door. But now you can inspect every individual thing. May not extend to every industry though.
donatj
I have a friend who automated his entire days work down to the click of a single button. He did not tell management because they were pretty scummy. He got written up for not "looking busy" despite his output being higher than his coworkers.
Business is stupid. They value busy-ness over productivity.
BeetleB
> He got written up for not "looking busy" despite his output being higher than his coworkers.
Also my experience with that first job. I would get the work done quicker than others, and leave around 5pm (most stayed beyond 6pm).
The message was clear: "There's always work to do. If you're getting work done early, you need to do more!"
I got worse ratings than people who achieved less. It also explains why coworkers refused to learn how to automate things.
Again: I automate to make my life easier. If it isn't working, I shouldn't do it.
overfeed
> Business is stupid. They value busy-ness over productivity.
Not stupid, just entitled to all of your innovation and productivity while you're on the clock (if waged) and off the clock (if you're salaried). If you've shown yourself to be an outlier - that's great for the business - and congratulations, you've aet yourself a new baseline. Isn't class economics just delightful[1]?
The only employees who have a more direct linkage between productivity and income are sales folk, and it's boom or bust there. If you're an engineer that somehow doubles your employers profits, don't dream they'll double your salary, a once-off bonus is the best you can hope for, at the next evaluation cycle.
1. From each, according to his ability. To each, according to "market" rates, and his negotiation skills.
anonymars
I guess it is right there in the name, isn't it?
Aurornis
Automation is a broad topic. At home I save time because my dishwasher automates washing my dishes. The clothes washer and dryer are a lot easier than doing it by hand. The fruit and vegetable at the grocery store are a lot cheaper than they would be without automation.
I think individuals who get comfortable in their jobs don’t like automation arriving at their station because it upends the order of things just as they were feeling comfortable and stable. Being adaptable now is more important than ever.
> Products don't get better either, but that's more of a "shareholder value" problem than it is a specific technology problem.
This is broadly false. Your laptop is unquestionably better because it was constructed with the help of automated CNC machines and PCB assembly as opposed to workers manually populating PCBs.
Some companies can try to use automation to stay in place with lower headcount, but they’ll be left behind by competition that uses automation to move forward. Once that leap happens it becomes accepted as the new normal, so it never feels like automation is making changes.
everforward
> Your laptop is unquestionably better because it was constructed with the help of automated CNC machines and PCB assembly as opposed to workers manually populating PCBs.
This is a fundamentally flawed analogy, because the problems are inverted.
CNC and automated PCB assembly work well because creating a process to accurately create the items is hard, but validation that the work is correct is easy. Due to the mechanics of CNC, we can't manufacture something more precise than we can measure.
LLMs are inverted; it's incredibly easy to get them to output something, and hard to validate that the output is correct.
The analogy falls apart if you apply that same constraint to CNC and PCB machines. If they each had a 10% chance of creating a faulty product in a way that can only be detected by the purchaser of the final product, we would probably go back to hand-assembling them.
> Some companies can try to use automation to stay in place with lower headcount, but they’ll be left behind by competition that uses automation to move forward.
I suspect there will be a spectrum, as there historically has been. Some companies will use AI heavily and get crazy velocity, but have poor stability as usage uncovers bugs in a poorly understood codebase because AI wrote most of it. Others will use AI less heavily and ship fewer features, but have fewer severe bugs and be more able to fix them because of deep familiarity with the codebase.
I suspect stability wins for many use cases, but there are definitely spaces where being down for a full day every month isn't the end of the world.
throwaway31131
Validation that a PCB was manufactured correctly is... easy. Disagree, but how about VLSI. It's hugely automated. Moore's Law is exponential but team sizes aren't. That productivity gap is made up for with huge amounts of automation. And nothing is easy about manufacturing validation of an ASIC.
I do think one primary difference between physical objects and software is we bother to have precise specifications that one can validate against, and I think that's what you're trying to get at. If all software had that then software could have an "easy" validation story too, I suppose.
I have mixed feelings about precise specifications in software. On the one hand the hardware engineer in me thinks everything should have an exact specification. On the other hand, that's throws away the "soft" advantage which is important for some types of software. So there is a spectrum.
godelski
Be careful of Lemon Markets[0]. The problem with them is that they create a stable low quality state. They tend to happen when product quality is not distinguishable at time of purchase.
Which I think we already see a fair amount of this in tech. Even as very tech literate people it can be hard to tell. But companies are definitely pushing to move fast and are willing to trade quality for that. If you're trying to find the minimum quality that a consumer is still willing to pay for, you're likely in a lemon market.
I mean look at Microsoft lately. They can't even get windows 11 right. There's clear quality control issues that are ruining the brand. Enough that us techies are joking that Microsoft is going to bring about the year of Linux, not because Linux has gotten better (also true) but because Microsoft keeps shooting itself in the foot. Or look at Apple with the new AirPods, they sound like shit. Same with Apple intelligence and liquid glass. A big problem (which helps lemon markets come into existence and be stable) is that competition is weak, with a very high barrier to entry. The market is centralized not only because the momentum and size of existing players (still major factor) but because it takes a lot of capital to even attempt to displace them. That's probably more money and more time than the vast majority of investors are willing to risk and the only ones with enough individual wealth are already tied to the existing space.
I think you also have it exactly right about LLMs and AI. A good tool makes failures clear and easy to identify. You design failure modes, even in code! But these machines are designed for human preference. Our methods that optimize for truth, accuracy, and human sounding language simultaneously optimize for deception. You can't penalize the network for wrong outputs if you don't recognize they are wrong.
A final note: you say velocity, I think that's inaccurate. Velocity has direction. It's more accurate to say speed.
everdrive
>Being adaptable now is more important than ever.
I do actually plan on getting old, and as much as I would love to retire before I'm no longer adaptable, I'm not so sure my finances or my brain will comply.
>At home I save time because my dishwasher automates washing my dishes.
I don't think this fits my analogy, because you personally can go watch TV or read a book or exercise given the time that is saved by the dishwasher. At work, you must be at work doing something else, and the "something else" is seldom a real improvement. If I could automate my job and then go on a hike I'd be a lot more excited about it.
Aurornis
> At work, you must be at work doing something else, and the "something else" is seldom a real improvement. If I could automate my job and then go on a hike I'd be a lot more excited about it.
When you find an employer that is happy to pay people to not work, let me know because I also want to work there.
bravetraveler
> At work, you must be at work doing something else
Speak for yourself, salary means I'm done when the work is. I encourage you to enjoy the hike, book, whatever. That said, I truly hate the induced demand LLMs offer.
pmg101
Let's say you could automate your job and go on a hike. Great! You can have a fun hike. But you wouldn't get paid for that.
I think it's broadly reasonable that you would only be paid for doing something someone else needs doing.
candiddevmike
I think "bottom up" or worker led automation works far, far better than top down. Leadership always comes up with "efficiency" ideas for automation without ever spending a day in the life of the people who will use the automation. And they almost always fail to realize any gains but disrupt everyone's workflow.
edflsafoiewq
You recoup the saving of home automation immediately as additional leisure time. But for most people, work automation neither reduces your working time nor increases your wage.
jadelcastillo
It's an interesting analogy. But one difference between dishwashers and LLMs is that you don't need to check the dishes afterward (if you maintain and use it properly).
almosthere
Yeah but to continue the analogy, the washer was JUST invented and your clothes will come out ruined for a while.
lovich
> I think individuals who get comfortable in their jobs don’t like automation arriving at their station because it upends the order of things just as they were feeling comfortable and stable. Being adaptable now is more important than ever.
Look at all the other threads with people’s experiences. They aren’t unhappy with automation because they were comfortable. They are unhappy with automation because the reward for being more productive is higher expectations and no compensation.
People think the Luddite movement was smashing looms because they inherently hated technology. They smashed the looms because the factories were producing more and the result of that productivity was the workers becoming destitute.
If the machines and progress only bring about a worse life for individuals, those individuals are going to be against the machines
fragmede
The two other things that come immediately to mind are clothes; if a shirt cost $4,000 per, our closets would look way different, and cars. No matter your personal opinion on cars vs public transportation, if even if the cheapest vehicle cost $500,000, society would look way different. The real thing it exposes though, is which side of the capital vs labor you work on. If the widget factory suddenly is able to make 10x the widgets in the same amount of time thanks to a new automated widget machine, if you're capital, you now have 10x the widgets to sell. Awesome! However, if you're labor, you still have a 40/hr a week job, regardless of how many widgets you make in a week. And the boss is counting how many widgets you make on the new machine they bought. At the edges of this in the tech industry we have website building. The market haven't yet totally adjusted to the lower costs of labor. What used to take 10 hours to build and you'd charge a client $3,000 for, now takes 2 hours but since the client was previously paying $3,000 for that service, you're not going to charge them less, you're going to take on additional clients. Or spend more time at the beach. In this scenario, the programmer is capital, not labor, and gets to reap the rewards of automation. Until the market catches up, anyway. Given that the industrial machine in the website builder's factory is a laptop and a cloud hosting bill, it's unclear if the Marxist division between capital and labor, burgousie and proletariat is still the right place to draw the lines, but the trade off is still there. If you're selling your time in exchange for money, automation means a faster conveyor belt that you need to adapt to, but you're still working 40/h a week. If you're selling widgets, automation means more widgets to sell.
harvey9
The customer who was paying 3000 for a website may now be going to somewhere like Wix.
rightbyte
Petite bourgeoisie maybe?
null
microtonal
I think it all hinges on recognizing what opportunities automation helps.
For instance, I had to rename a collection of files almost following a pattern. I know that there are apps that do this and normally I’d reach for the Perl-based rename script. But I do it so irregularly that I have to install it every time, figure out how I can do a dry run first, etc. Meanwhile, with the Raycast AI integration that also supports Finder, I did it in the 10-15 seconds that it took to type the prompt.
There are a lot of tasks that you do not do often enough to commit them fully to memory, but every time you do them it takes a lot of time. LLM-based automation really speeds up these tasks. Similar for refactors that an IDE or language server cannot do, some kinds of scripts etc.
On the other hand LLMs constantly mess up some algorithms and data structures, so I simply do not let LLMs touch certain code.
It’s all about getting a feeling for the right opportunities. As with any tool.
brendoelfrendo
> For instance, I had to rename a collection of files almost following a pattern. I know that there are apps that do this and normally I’d reach for the Perl-based rename script. But I do it so irregularly that I have to install it every time, figure out how I can do a dry run first, etc. Meanwhile, with the Raycast AI integration that also supports Finder, I did it in the 10-15 seconds that it took to type the prompt.
> On the other hand LLMs constantly mess up some algorithms and data structures, so I simply do not let LLMs touch certain code.
See, these two things seem at odds to me. I suppose it is, to a degree, knowledge that you can learn over time: that an LLM is suitable for renaming files but not for certain other tasks. But for me, I'd be really cautious about letting an AI rename a collection of files, to the point that the same restrictions apply as would apply to a script: I'd need to create the prompt, verify the output via a dry run or test run, modify as necessary, and ultimately let the AI loose and hope for the best.
Meanwhile, I probably have a script kicking around somewhere that will rename a batch of files, and I can modify it pretty quickly to match a new pattern, test it out, and be confident that it will do exactly what I expect it to do.
Is one of these paths faster than the other? I'm not sure; it's probably a wash. The AI would definitely be faster if I was confident I could trust it. But I'm not sure how I can cross that threshold in my mind and be confident that I can trust it.
saxenaabhi
> See, these two things seem at odds to me. I suppose it is, to a degree, knowledge that you can learn over time: that an LLM is suitable for renaming files but not for certain other tasks. But for me, I'd be really cautious about letting an AI rename a collection of files, to the point that the same restrictions apply as would apply to a script: I'd need to create the prompt, verify the output via a dry run or test run, modify as necessary, and ultimately let the AI loose and hope for the best.
Why? I never understand this level of caution since don't we all use VC? Just feed it the prompt and if it messes up undo the changes.
gmadsen
as part of the prompt, have a test suite with test files. Its still fully automated by the LLM but adds confidence
bdangubic
> and then potentially your own skills stagnate as you rely on LLMs more and more.
I hear this so often these days and I quite do not understand this part. If I trust LLM do to "X" that means i have made a determination that LLM is top-notch with "X" (if I did not make this determination then letting LLMs do X would be lunacy) and henceforth I do not give a flying hoot to know "X" and if my "X" skills deteriorate it is same thing as when we got equipment to tend to our corn fields and my corn picking skills deteriorated. of course I am being facetious here but you get the point.
surajrmal
Do you like washing laundry at the river or carrying water from the well back to your house? You cannot talk in generalities about this topic as it is too broad.
There are definitely many things which when automated loses out on some edge cases. But most folks don't need artisanal soap.
jstummbillig
This is just empirically not true. Increase in productivity has lead to broad increase in prosperity (with one relatively recent but currently very important caveat, the housing market).
Now, if what you actually want is to be relatively more prosperous and have more status that's a game you can keep playing forever. But you really don't have to, to simply be better off than all people in the past with far less work.
subsection1h
> Increase in productivity has lead to broad increase in prosperity
All of my grandparents retired in their 50s with fat pensions and then lived into their late 80s without having ever stepped foot on a college campus.
jstummbillig
You can do that today. But there was a no episode in history where that would have bene the norm or more likely than it is today. Anecdotes are just that.
philipwhiuk
A bigger caveat is that measuring improvement by 'prosperity' is both vague (are you using GDP, GDP/capita or GDP/capita of the lowest 10%) and arbitrary (perhaps a better measure is the life expectancy of the poorest 10%).
jstummbillig
That does not seem like a caveat at all, given that the improvement is completely obvious for all of these.
lovich
> Now, if what you actually want is to be relatively more prosperous and have more status that's a game you can keep playing forever. But you really don't have to, to simply be better off than all people in the past with far less work.
Everyone I grew up with or met via work that is my age or younger has 1-3 more degrees than their parents and grandparents and are significantly worse off when it comes to standard life milestones like buying a home or ever having children.
We are not becoming relatively more prosperous as a people. We have more bread and circuses and less roofs over our heads on average
null
mclau153
You could remove "you still need to work 40 hours a week"
OptionOfT
For me, it is making my work miserable.
I'm seeing amount of changes needed to produce new features when coding with these AI tools constantly increasing, due to the absence of a proper foundation, and due to the willingness of people to accept it, with the idea that 'we can change it quickly'.
It has become acceptable to push those changes in a PR and present them as your own, filled with filler comments that are instant tech debt, because they just repeat the code.
And while I actually don't care who writes the code, I do expect the PR author to properly understand the code and most importantly, the impact on the codebase.
In my role as a mentor I now spend a lot of time looking at things written and wonder: Did the author write this, or did they AI? Because if the code is wrong, this question changes how the conversation goes.
It also impacts the kind of energy I'm willing to put in into educating the other person as to how things can be improved.
figers
I reject commits like this, make them re-write it and explain why such and such coding will never be allowed in our code base.
Forces the change in coding practice.
bakugo
> I reject commits like this
Which is a great idea until your superior asks why you're holding back the vibe coders and crippling their 100x productivity by rejecting their PRs instead of just going with the flow.
butlike
Which is the hill you get paid to die on as a manager. Die on the hill and ask for your severance package.
figers
I'm in a unique situation where I started the company so there's nobody above me.
jonator
The issue you described is an issue with AI?
lezojeda
[dead]
jrowen
This is due to the flawed cornerstone of our culture that a person's job is their worth and value and purpose in the world. This was necessary when the combined efforts of our labor were still not enough to provide basic needs for the people.
The dream of automation was always to fix that. We did that, and more. We have long had the technology to provide for people. But we invent tons of meaningless unnecessary jobs and still cling to the "jobs" model because that's all we know. It's the same reason vaccuum cleaners didn't reduce the amount of cleaning work to be done. We never say "great, I can do less now because I have a thing to do it for me." That thing just enables me to fixate on the next thing "to be done." The next dollar to be gained.
A McDonalds robot should free the people of doing that kind of work. But instead those people become "unemployed" and one individual gets another yacht and creates a couple "marketing" jobs that don't actually provide any value in a holistic humanitarian sense.
xg15
That's part of it, but I think not the whole picture. Many jobs do have some genuine benefits they give the employee (in addition to salary) : practical experience and skill training, but most importantly a certain degree of influence and power: You can't go on strike if you don't have a job.
Those are cold comfort if compensation isn't enough or the job ruins your health or drives you into burnout, but I think their absence becomes important if you talk about popular UBI or "end of work" scenarios.
That's why I think even if we had some friendly tech company that did All The Jobs for free using automation and allowed everyone to live a comfortable life without even the need for an income, and even if we changed the culture such that this was totally fine, it would still be a dystopia, or at least risk very quickly drifting into one: Because while everyone could live a happy, fully consumption-oriented life, they'd have zero influence how to live that life: If the company does everything for you that is to be done, it also has all the knowledge and power to set the rules.
consumer451
I know it's making me work more, and I am thrilled. I have not shipped production code for 20 years, and it was desktop back then.
I am now able to single-handedly create webapp MVPs, one of which is getting traction. If anything actually takes-off, there will certainly be need for a real dev to take over. Also, my commits are not "vibe coded." I have read every single loc, and found so many issues that I am stunned that "vibe coding" is actually a thing. I do let the models run wild on prototypes though.
I think that I happen to be in some magical sweet spot as a person who knows the words, kept up with tech, but not the syntax of framework xyz.
I thought this sweet spot was very transient, and I am very happy that the tools appear to be reaching a plateau for now, so I still have at least another year of being useful.
Since agentic dev tools arrived, I am having the time of my life while gladly working 60hrs per week.
I realize that I am an outlier, but is anyone else in this same boat? If you have product ideas, is this not the best time ever to build? All of our ideas are being indirectly subsidized by billions of VC & FAANG dollars. That is pretty freaking cool.
CharlesW
> I realize that I am an outlier, but is anyone else in this same boat?
Yep. I have a computer science background but have always been "the most technical product management/marketing guy in the room". Now I'm having lots of fun building a SaaS and a mobile app to my standards, plus turning out micro-projects like pwascore.com in a day or two.
It turns out that I love designing/architecting products, just not the grind-y coding bits. Because I create lots of tests, use code analysis tools, etc., I'm confident that I'm creating higher quality code than (for example) what most outsourced coders are creating without LLMs.
xg15
I'd like to know, from people who really believe that we just need to invent the right technology, then we could all do 20 hour weeks and spend the rest of the time in leisure, what keeps them from doing that right now, and what exactly they believe that miracle tech would change.
It seems relatively obvious to me that if a society has work as its cultural core then no amount of productivity increase will get rid of work - it would destabilize the entire society before it could do so.
fainpul
Some people seem to be under the impression that they (the employees) and their employers are a team, working towards the same goal (a better life with more spare time for everyone).
I just wrote this comment in another thread, but it fits here too:
The development, production and use of machines to replace labour is driven by employers to produce more efficiently, to gain an edge and make more money.
You, as an employee, are just means to an end. "The company" doesn't care about you and you will not reap the benefits of whatever efficiency improvements the future brings.
xg15
Yep. But new technologies like this are often flanked by press coverage that frames them as beneficial for employees because then they'd have to work less... I'm not sure if those articles are genuinely naive or simply propaganda.
elcapithanos
I did not anticipate this much traffic, working on restoring it right now
Narciss
I’ve heard that GPT 5 Pro is great at fixing bugs.
SomaticPirate
Curious about your hosting stack? I'm always curious if a jam stack site can handle these big surges better. Or is this just a single VPS?
WorldPeas
Maybe it's hosted on a disposable vape
sh3rl0ck
Ah yes, the good ol' HN hug o' death.
gossipaddress
[dead]
tokyolights2
Sounds similar to [Jevon's Paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox), although here the resource is developer time.
BirAdam
If the history of the world since the Industrial Revolution can teach anything, it is that while the machines took much of the work, they did not shorten the workday. Instead, we all just work more. Since the Information Revolution, some people get off work, go home, and continue to work. It never stops. The companies of the world will never tolerate giving people more time off. Why do that when people could just get more done in fewer total days?
Personally, in the times I've had the most time off, I find that I am more productive, but that doesn't matter to any employer.
onlyrealcuzzo
> If the history of the world since the Industrial Revolution can teach anything, it is that while the machines took much of the work, they did not shorten the workday
I guess you missed the part where people worked 7 days a week and 10 hours per day, and we didn't have ~20% of the population retired.
Unless we break social contracts, in 30 years ~40% of the population will be retired in large parts of The West and China.
If you're still working 40 hours a week, doing basically nothing but posting on HN, going to the gym, having lunch for hour+ breaks, for most of the work day - you might think nothing has changed.
But for 10-20% more of the population to not be working, there's a huge number of hours that aren't being worked.
It's just that most of the gains are going to one group of people.
Most of us will be in that group by that time...
dancerofaran
Does anyone actually look at evidence anymore or do they just look at the twitter ramblings of YC founders thinking this models reality?
Founders have been doing stupid signalling for ages to seem like they are more worthy of VC funding. A single anecdote in a podcast about a badly written Wired article based on a few anecdotes from hustle culture founders does not make something true.
Working 80 hour weeks for low pay and high expected upside has ALWAYS been SV software culture.
The individual leverage of an experienced software developer has never been higher.
1dom
Page doesn't load for me. I'm in the UK, not sure if geoblocked.
But a response to the title: "_buzzword tech_ is making us work more" - it's rarely the tech making us work more, it's normally the behaviour and attitude of businesses trying to profit from the tech that makes life hard for everyone.
greener_grass
It does just seem to be "down".
But such is that state of the UK that I had simply assumed the government had censored it. Remarkable how quickly expectations have shifted.
gdulli
"Making" can mean different things. Yes, the new technology directly increases work by introducing new categories of tasks and a new learning treadmill to consume the time savings. Yes, the new technology does indirectly make us work harder by raising the expectations from management of how much we can get done in the same amount of time.
DrewADesign
Catalysts and causes might be entirely unrelated in a vacuum, but in context, they’re inextricably linked. In the real world, if the effects weren’t genuinely unforeseeable, manufacturers can’t absolve themselves that easily.
palata
Adding a data point: it's not loading in the US either.
RemiGaudin
Not loading from France too.
sfitz
probably hugged to death
null
JohnMakin
I've had jobs with 70-80 hour weeks I genuinely loved, and jobs that required maybe 4-8 hours a week of actual time devoted to it that burnt me out. Burnout is a lot more complicated than the sheer number of hours worked - if you are deriving meaningful value from such a schedule, and feel what you are doing is worthwhile, and you feel valued and compensated accordingly - you're not likely to mind that much. The issue of course is that this is rarely the case, and plenty of studies have shown there are severe diminishing returns to working past 50 hours in a week in knowledge work that I doubt AI is going to really help with that much.
rodolphoarruda
Site is down to me, but I agree with the argument. I speak for myself: I think AI has removed a lot of small barriers that would naturally slow my work down, increasing dissatisfaction and stress with it. Without barriers, productivity increases and with it, work satisfaction. It's just nice to get things done(tm) faster and at a lower effort due to the quality of the virtual assistant.
themanmaran
This is certainly something I have felt. The idea of spending a day or two debugging a small problem, coming up with the right regex, or setting up boilerplate is all gone. Now it's 30 seconds, and you're right back to the high level "what do I build next" thinking.
Which is great, and has unblocked so much productivity, but I do miss some of the grunt work. I feel like it helped spawn new ideas and gave you some time to think through implementation.
candiddevmike
You don't have the epiphany that you're going down a dead end road anymore ("there has to be a better way"). Now codebases will be littered with dead end roads.
rodolphoarruda
> coming up with the right regex
Yes, and this a meme I have in my mind of LLM engineers talking to each other and a balloon: "If we could just get the right regex done in a few seconds we'd win the entire global programming community."
null
Narciss
Hopefully they get AI to fix it
dionian
Same experience here. spend more hours babysitting AI but able to do 3x the work while i wait. and willing to start new challenges that take a lot of effort without the new tools.
I was never excited for automation. Automation doesn't mean we do less. It means that we do as much work, and now also the work has a higher complexity ceiling; you need to understand the systems that are being automated, and need to maintain the automation. More things are possible, but everything is more complex, and of course, you still need to work 40 hours a week. Products don't get better either, but that's more of a "shareholder value" problem than it is a specific technology problem.
And yes, I only talked about automation, but the same high-level issues apply to LLMs, but with different downsides: you need to check the LLM output which becomes a bigger topic, and then potentially your own skills stagnate as you rely on LLMs more and more.