Agreed. We're still bottlenecked when it comes to feature work because we need to think of the ideas, user test, talk with stakeholders etc. But somehow inventing loads of tasks to feel busy anyways. Those tasks are the side quests, things we normally wouldn't take on. It feels great to finally squash that bug or do that rewrite. But you're adding stuff onto everyone else's plate as well. Discussions, reviews etc, a constant barrage of new things to consider.

I wish my colleagues respected todo lists. Must be nice to just be able to get though a day without constant interruptions. ::sad face::

I like this and then I also timeblock so I write out manually on paper every 30 minute increment, and then as the day goes you mark what you did in the previous 30 minute block. Doesn't need to be perfect but it kind of anchors you when at a desk and then it's interesting to look back at the end of the day and see how productive or unproductive you were.

Good strat.

We can also just ditch the AI. It is more trouble then it’s worth.

Aluminum used to be more expensive than platinum. Now we crumple it up and throw it in the bin. AI has done the same thing to the cost of a line of code.

100%.

And a corollary being that without any time spent on the "mundane", almost every single aspect of the work becomes the genuinely consequential decision-making steps.

Which I find exhausting.

I see this directly. I'm an engineer but part of that is doing non-engineer work like making powerpoints, whitepapers, and generic work that's necessary but that I would delegate to someone else if I were high enough on the totem pole.

AI gives me the ability to do that stuff faster so I can focus more on the 20% and the quality of what I'm doing, not the nuance of formatting a document.

> But now you can do that work to an ±80% quality level of the old, manual way, but in 1% of the time.

But what happens when the 20% quality margin that we lost aggregates over different layers of infrastructure and compounds into brokenness and chaos?

I have a completely different perspective on this.

During the day, I am using Opus 5.5 to develop solutions our team would never think was possible two years ago.

Ar night I am watching my 5yo learn how to read and do math. The sense of accomplishment he shows being able to add double digits is contagious.

Nothing is mundane. One man's basic work is another man's magic. When we have appreciation for each other, we advance more as a species.

> The opening premise baffles me. What kind of illusion must one be under to believe that employers would ever pay you the same amount of money to do less work?

It seems like a pretty common misunderstanding in rank-and-file AI-boosterism. I'm guessing that reflects their initial experience, before their employer adjusts their expectations, extrapolated out to infinity. Your correct understanding makes AI sound like a bad deal for workers (and it is), so my theory AI-enthusiastic boosters have to engage in a degree of reality distortion to keep up their enthusiasm.

I’ve been baffled by how common these illusions about the labor market can be among people who have been isolated from the realities of the world in their career. I most commonly see it in juniors who never had jobs before graduating college, but I’ve heard it from adults who didn’t realize how much of their career fell into a very lucky, cushy track.

One of my strangest memories was a junior hire who decided after a few months that they didn’t like the work they were hired to do (which was exactly the job description, no surprises).

They informed their boss that the job wasn’t working out for them so the company would have to find some different work for them to do. There were a lot of difficult conversations trying to explain that they were hired to do a specific job that was needed, not to become part of a family where everyone belongs no matter what. This was a small company that didn’t have other open roles and wouldn’t have the budget to backfill even if they could move the person.

Yet it didn’t register. The person viewed their job as a jobs program, where they were chosen to join the company like a family and then it was the company’s job to find enjoyable work for them to do. They saw the paycheck as owed for their presence, and work produced for the company to be a nice bonus when it worked out.

It was a difficult situation until the person was finally let go because they could not accept the idea that their job was to do work in exchange for pay, and that the company wasn’t going to pay them if their work was not producing the necessary.

That’s the most extreme example but I’ve run into this a lot more in recent years. It got really bad again for the cohort of graduates who entered the job market post-COVID and thought getting jobs was always going to be this easy. I’ve been helping with resume review on and off and it’s stunning to see so many people who worked for 2-3 years post-COVID and can’t really tell you what work they did, but are so angry and shocked that their employers let them go.

You are missing a critical third - people organize and via unions or the polls push back and require less work. There is no reason we aren’t working seven days a week beyond people fighting not to.

We have our own small boutique software type of business, so we aren't dealing with "employers", but all of us have never worked more, and for less (per hour) pay. Customers simply have higher expectations now, and we have to compete globally with basically an entire planet willing to vibe-code things, along with internal pressure at clients of "we can just do this ourselves".

So that means shipping higher quality, faster, with more features, and for a lower end price.

> What kind of illusion must one be under to believe that employers would ever pay you the same amount of money to do less work?

Because supposedly, the new tooling (in this case, AI) allows them to produce the same or greater output despite doing less work. Workers are under the perennial illusion that they'll ever benefit from productivity gains, but that hasn't been the case since the 1970s.

The point is work is exploding. Mgmt. until AI could be reasoned with. Trade-offs between different interests and stakeholders were negotiated like investing in features now vs. development velocity vs. long term architecture vs. bug fixes vs. production incidents.

Now with AI and the flood of CVEs, management anxiety makes discussions much harder. Throw in unrealistic expectations about productivity - derived from venture money fueled AI POCs in greenfield hotel california and stress goes up.

The CVE’s drive work, the introduction of AI drives work, the old ci/cd is creaking under the load and architecture really needs a rethink. Add to that the genius manager pronouncing that very soon nobody will be coding fueling the dissonance between what is needed from me today and where we are supposedly heading increasing motivation - not.

Wages do historically appear to grow slightly above inflation: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q so some of the productivity gain is captured by the workers.

How much, presumably, depends on their bargaining power, such as unions or low unemployment.

The question is not so much how AI affects productivity, but how it affects the economic value of human labor.

A rational employer is interested in how much value they can get, not how hard you work. In most cases, in the short term, an increase in efficiency means they can get more value from you working the same amount of the same pay.

We had to riot and sometimes people were killed rioting to secure the weekend.

If things are to rebalance again and give some of the productivity gains back to the rest of us, we should be working far less and I hope it comes with less of a fight than it took for us to get 2 days a week off.

It's been over 100 years now.

Yeah, I also don't get why people expect to work 2 hrs instead of 8 and receive same salary.

Once you go from horse to tractor the fields increase but work hours doesn't decrease. And if you still use a horse, you are outperformed by the tractor guys who will sell stuff at less the price that you can sustain.

> Realistically there were only ever two possible outcomes: you do more work for the same amount of money, or you’re one of the ones who were laid off and your work was transferred to the former.

Workers need an answer to this problem and we shouldn't wait until all the deleterious effects stack up to make the demand.

A 32 hour work week would be a really good start.

I feel like this conflates work with productivity. One can be working more than ever and still be unproductive.

In my opinion what people think is that they will be more productive for the same amount of work, not have more work than previously and still only be approximately at the same level of productivity.

What AI has done to many is create more busywork than it solves in many cases, rather than making me more efficient for the same amount of working hours.

It’s been deployed widely enough that it’s becoming apparent where its lines are from genuine tool that boosts productivity to bolted on and makes things the same or worse, the pipeline for the work simply looking different

> The only way it will result in less work and the same or better quality of life is if you’re self-employed or are employed by a compassionate human. Sadly that does not apply to the majority of people.

Even that is unlikely. If you are self-employed in any remotely competitive industry, everyone is continuing to work the same amount and AI is boosting their productivity. If you just start slacking off, your product will become inferior.

This then extends to the employment situation as well.

Only way you can get less work is if you (or your employer) are in a monopoly with a strong moat.

Yeah, everybody wants freedom and flexibility from self-employment, but that's generally speaking not a realistic attainable goal. The most defensible small businesses are ones that are sweaty i.e. require a lot hard work and hours others just wont justify doing, and that's an extremely important facet because without employees its much easier for a business to catastrophically collapse. Pretty much by definition anything that requires low effort is easy to clone and thus become saturated.

Perhaps is not correctly phrased, but the way I see it:

Because these tools are now available whoever that is up in the management chain (possibly someone that has no idea about code or technology) is now entitled to request the undeliverable in the same amount of time.

I believe a couple of scenarios might unfold in the near mid-term future:

* Programming becomes now a task that anyone can do (assuming models outpace even the highest standards when it comes to certain software qualities). Under this premise wages go to the floor, now even grandma can do it.

* Companies still demand competent people as models plateau and do not offer outstanding software qualities yet the output is good enough that programmers should be able to do way way more than before. The job should then be high-paid but turns out highly-stressful.

* For some years eveything goes "just fine" under the vibe code party until competent people at major companies realize that have disastrous products and basically unfixable. Models start to decay. Then old school competent developers become again highly required and only a minority of "skilled-previous-generation" programmers that decided to keep doing things the old way get desperately required.

Obviously no-one has the crystal ball and anything can happen...

For years, decades even, employers were straight up offended by the idea of paying someone work 4 days instead of 5 days, while paying them the same. It made zero economical sense to them.

Then companies started testing it out, and have noticed that things like sick leaves plummeted, and that the employees produced the same amount, sometimes even more.

> employers would ever pay you the same amount of money to do less work?

Shouldn’t they now pay more for more work?

I don’t think this was ever the idea. It’s always been pitched as a productivity improvement tool but AI leadership comms has clearly been a complete clusterf*k.

The idea is that each individual employee does more with less and therefore the price of the end product comes down, raising the standard of living for everybody.

Once a total economic conversion happens, which might take a decade, individual employees can definitely upskill and jump revenue bands. Electric utility workers get paid 10x more than the lamplighters of yore, but it’s just a different job.

Because for salaried knowledge work, the premise is that your impact or output and not the hours worked is the basis for your compensation.

Suppose someone (pre AI) wrote 100k lines in 50 hrs/week of bad code but someone else wrote 10k good lines working 40 hours. In theory the former person would not be the high performer.

I agree many places don’t work that way, but also many do - so it’s maybe a hard discussion to have broadly and not scoped to the individuals limited experience.

> The only way it will result in less work and the same or better quality of life is if you’re self-employed or are employed by a compassionate human.

May we take this as an opportunity to recognize what a bad deal we get from most employers and explore better ways to organize labor. It's never been more possible. UBI is unlikely to happen and uncertain it would even be beneficial. If AI can lead to a better world, this seems like the most promising path.

>What kind of illusion must one be under to believe that employers would ever pay you the same amount of money to do less work?

There's the historical experience with early/mid 20th century unions, the establishment of the 8 hour workweek and worker rights, even Henry Ford's wage increases.

Not necessarily that they'd do it out of their own good heart, of course.

What can make sense, and what has been my personal experience, is that I have shifted my most draining work to the AI, so I can actually get more useful work done without getting exhausted. Just like 10 hours mining sitting inside of equipment is better than 10 hours with a pickaxe and a shovel, even if we ignore productivity

This is the goal of every productivity gain from the worker's side, and owners failing to deliver for long enough inevitably results in revolution (usually after some demand-destroying crisis).

What you call an illusion is reality, and the notion that it's an illusion is absurd.

If you don't recall the early innings of AI - that was a big promise from a vocal group of people.

What does compassion have to do with it? If the industry requires more output or your business fails what options do you have?

Also, as someone who has been self employed I can tell you that you're working 2x-3x as much as someone who is employed and you have to pay more in taxes.

I am surprised people don't look at this like hiring a plumber. When you hire a company to do something for you if they are doing less work and/or the work is easy enough you can do it yourself, you would not want to pay someone a lot to do the work.

> The only way it will result in less work and the same or better quality of life is if you’re self-employed or are employed by a compassionate human

Or you have a good union

At best all we can do is make knowledge work cheaper right now. But knowledge work was never the bottleneck behind energy prices, food production, transportation, cargo, etc.

> same amount of money to do less work

Um… work is not important. Value is important. Your employer is employing you because they expect your value to be higher than your cost. Moreover, if you are busy, your marginal value is likely declining. You are not taking the time to think about things that will actually have high impact. This to me is the biggest problem I see with AI assisted work, it makes it very easy to feel productive, when in reality you only worked on the easy low value things.

What’s more, is I have a very distinct experience working on a team years ago that decided to do less work. The team actively started turning down tickets and commiting to fewer tasks each week. And the counter intuitive thing, was that not only did that force only the higher value tickets get closed, we actually ended up closing more tickets. Was really wild to watch and experience.

Oh but AI has wiped out some of the most tedious work I have to do. I can now easily work every waking minute, and some sleeping minutes, at a level approximately comparable to my prior 8h workload from 10 years ago if I wanted!

The amount of mental energy saved, and downright stimulation gained from seeing rapid feedback in a tight loop is making my workday much easier. I have enough left to continue it longer.

EDIT: Making the continuation mandatory would be a bad thing, but it's not bad that I can do this now.

Even in the first paragraph the author goes into some nuance about what they mean and it's not at all what you're saying? Years ago, I'd work on one or two things at a time. Now I do maybe 10+ things in parallel. I work more hours, "let me just finish up this one thing" I'll say, and I look at the clock and it's later than I thought. At the end of the day, my brain is cooked. Right now I'm motivated by the novelty of this new tool that gives me superhuman productivity, but a few years from now when that novelty has worn off? Well, probably a few years from now we won't have software in any recognizable sense anyway, so maybe it's not worth thinking about.

If the overall efficiency of the economy improves, "the same amount of money" can afford more things. You don't get a bigger share of the pie, but the pie gets bigger.

If you also want a bigger share of the larger pie you need to be one of the people driving its growth, merely being employed by one of the many competing companies that is purchasing more efficient tools from a third party vendor does not qualify.

I work for a big company.

I always plan our capacity based on a % of bugs/support/upgrade vs. new feature development which is roughly at 50%.

AI will be able to reduce this while also increasing quality which will allow us build more features faster which is actually quite fun.

How it will impact budget etc. no clue yet, in best case though i can transfer my team into a new product while maintaining the old one with very little effort.

I'd recommend those employers to read "The Goal" from Eliyahu M. Goldratt.

By not limiting WIP they are actually making their employees less efficient.

there is a 3rd option and it involves us organizing and actually exerting some of our power as the critical dependency in basically all of the modern economy.

Then we riot and burn it to the ground.

The value proposition is extremely simple:

1. Clankers do almost everything for us as ethical slaves

2. Everything costs next to nothing, from raw materials to finished products, and much of it can be done at home, sustainably and even better than we have it today

3. Society transitions towards utopia, basic needs met for all, away from hand-to-mouth, and we spend our time on friends, family, community and personal enrichment

The alternative is a dystopia beyond Orwellian.

People need to get this idea into their heads: our governments work for us and with almost infinite cheap robot labour and national resources the focus should be on society and not enriching some fucking crooks.

Its literally us or them, literally a fight for our lives

Market dynamics will sort this out

I agree that it's incredibly naive, but it's pretty much the sales pitch from the AI industry to the rest of society.

I think there is a real world space separating people in work experience.

I've never worked a job where 40hrs was even enough, so any efficiency is instantly absorbed. That is the work world as I see it.

However I've run into in people online and in real life whom's entire work life seems to be on the opposite side. It seems to be a rather large swath of people as well. They have never worked anywhere where they even have 40hrs of work a week to be done.

Even last year I ran into a guy who gets paid 140k to by his own admission(12+yrs), to basically update a handful of websites a few times a week(shockingly...he is concerned about ai taking his job). Those jobs are not coming back and those that exist are rapidly drying up. Thats the disconnect. There are in a national sense a large number of people that have literally never worked an actual job even though they went into an office their whole working life, and everything about their life outside all reflect that they have worked a job despite never having done so. Those people are in for some tough times.

In other words, companies capture all the benefits of AI, while the workers get the downsides.

No wonder there's so much animosity towards AI -- it's not the tech itself, it's the fact that it makes the lives of a small minority better while making the lives of the vast majority worse.

It could be used to make most people's lives better, but it's not, and it won't be.

Or, you know, solve this politically and implement an economy that redistributes wealth from the top back to ordinary people.

If productivity goes through the roof, working part-time may become normalized.

It's not that simple. In a time of massive flux and shake up you have to be ready to jump to different kinds of roles in different kinds of organizations. Maybe you've been an enterprise and need to jump to a startup or the reverse... or maybe you've been in an internal only role and need to move into a customer facing role or any number of other possibilities. Admittedly one way of interpreting the need for evolving is that it could be exhausting so in that sense the author has a point but it's not as black and white as you imply. At any moment in time there are growth areas in the economy and growth teams within companies and there are atrophying or declining areas of the economy or teams within companies. These macrodynamics are just as important as who you happen to work for and what the tools du jour mean for your work. But they require you to be intentionalable about making changes

Oh, but it's very simple. You have elections, you collectively don't vote for the uniparty, you raise the minimum wage and then they will pay.

One can pretend it is very very complicated and invent many excuses. One can pretend not to notice only the uniparty is promoted on the Tee Vee and in the old media. One can pretend it doesn't cost many millions to pull the wool over your eyes.

Surely if increasing the minimum wage was impossible they wouldn't need to do all that? They would keep the money in their pocket. Apparently those with absolute control over everything experience it quite differently? They seem to still believe you can change things.

>The opening premise baffles me. What kind of illusion must one be under to believe that employers would ever pay you the same amount of money to do less work?

Work is about the work written down in your work contract. If you manage to fulfill your contract by doing less, you still worked according to your contract so you should be able to expect the same amount of pay.

Let me get this straight: If someone who works for you takes more time but achieves less in that time, you would still pay them more. And if they took less time but achieved more, you would pay them less? That's some sick logic.

> The opening premise baffles me. What kind of illusion must one be under to believe that employers would ever pay you the same amount of money to do less work?

You do much less work than a farm labourer 200 years ago and get paid more.

Oh, so in your view, productivity improvements are not meant to benefit the workers?

Exactly. That's why we NEED THE STATE to intervene and ask for wealth redistribution, because employers won't do it willingly

Technological progress only serves the ruling class. Can we say that?

By your logic, the quantity of work will eventually expand to the point where 1 person (or less) does everything. I agree with you.

I did a deep dive with AI last night and asked it: if we extrapolate the level of industrialization vs the rate of job loss due to AI, what year does it become cheaper to live off-grid in an independent community?

The AI's answer? Between 2030 and 2035.

Meaning that money will soon require so much productivity to acquire, that it will eventually become easier to produce goods and services independently and provide for ourselves.

The main reason is that currently labor represents 60% of the workforce while owners represent 40%. That is flipping to 45/55, meaning that labor is on the verge of losing its majority stakeholder status and collective bargaining power.

When that happens, we'll only be left with market forces propping up wages. Meaning that AI automation will gradually undermine wages to the point of subsistence.

When that happens, the opportunity cost of exiting the traditional economy drops to 0. Why would anyone work at the behest of an owner when they could be an owner themselves for the same or lesser labor?

Now, we could reject that and pretend that supply and demand curves won't be undermined by a falling cost of production. We could do that, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader who won't hear a word I'm saying anyway.

If we stay rooted in history and extrapolate, we're left with at least these options:

a) Allow free market capitalism to regress into authoritarian neofeudalism and create conditions similar to those of the early 20th century when robber baron industrialization caused widespread wage stagnation, leading to revolution and the seising of industry by displaced workers (communism or more accurately state capitalism like Russia's Bolshevik Revolution in 1917).

b) Raise taxes on the wealthy/capitalists (the owners of the means of production) through increased regulation, and use the proceeds to buy back and nationalize those economic inputs to fund public services and UBI (socialism like China's Second Centenary Goal or 2049 Plan).

c) Embrace the rapidly falling cost of technology to get ahead of widespread unemployment and bring about something like solarpunk, where open source tech like AI and 3D printing allow society to reduce the cost of living to nearly 0, so that people have the leisure time to embrace art, culture and the humanities to finally achieve widespread self-actualization (post-scarcity economics a.k.a. Star Trek when it eradicated poverty, hunger and war around 2113, 50 years after Zefram Cochrane achieved warp drive in 2063 and the Vulcans made first contact, as the story goes).

I'm partial to one of these, and have been putting my efforts into a home economics that can provide for at least one other person so that it can go viral. If we dream big enough, we could finally have what the wealthy and powerful will never have: enough.

> The opening premise baffles me. What kind of illusion must one be under to believe that employers would ever pay you the same amount of money to do less work?

I guess the idea that AI will do all the work and either take care of us or kill us all. Which will probably happen, but the transition takes years and in the meantime we work much harder. People were expecting a fast takeoff.

With AI you can be either a centaur or a reverse centaur - as long as you delegate only the implementation but maintain control over the direction, outcome and taste. This means only 1-2 tasks at a time.

When you begin to delegate high-level thinking to the machine, which is inevitable with “many tasks, all at once” (the alternative is burnout like the article describes), that’s when you transform into the reverse centaur.

+1 to The Reverse Centaur, but I don't think it matches what the author describes. As a VP of Technology he presumably has some latitude in choosing what to work on.

I'd think about it this way - with LLMs I'm still a human with one brain, one set of hands, one keyboard, one screen.

I can delegate more quickly, but still I'm constrained to what I can respond to because I can focus on limited amount of thing at a time. It's like I was given multiple sets of hands (so your centaur parable stands), but that doesn't make me faster if I need to do multiple things at the same time - have you tried juggling, chewing gum and skipping at the same time?

It depends if you were a dev who liked more the micro parts or a dev who liked more the macro parts. To compare, think about going to an artisan or a musician or a painter (or any creative like most programmer who started by being passionate about it) and telling him "well now you can ignore the fine details, there is a tool which does that for you and you just focus on the less mundane tasks."

I for sure know I would get a slap in the face

> less mundane

This 100%. Past me would really enjoy writing a regex or inspect some undocumented API. Today me likes solving problems more, so I just throw Claude at the undocumented endpoint and after 10 minutes I've got a documentation with examples.

It's completely true that we get to focus on the fun parts, but I think the burnout some of us are feeling is that the boring parts were also protecting us. It wasn't always fun to spend an afternoon mapping out a 500 line python class; but it sure was relaxing, and a good reason for deadlines to shift forwards and back by a day or two when they needed to. Now we only do the fun parts, which also are all of the least well-specified tasks, the parts that require 100% of our brains, the people-focused parts, and the most time-sensitive parts. All things which leave us tired at the end of the day, even if they are fun. Not to mention the 5-10x increase in context switching, which is itself draining.

Perhaps we'll work out new norms for how to organize our time sustainably. Or perhaps ClaudeCodex will finish blowing through the job of a SWE in the next 24 months (remember, it's only really 12 months old in its current form).

> One thing I feel like a lot of us are missing is that we no longer have to worry about looking for a missing semicolon, typo, or off by 1 error, or manually combing logs to try and understand a problem.

This is what I hope for, but every time I use ChapGPT and similar, I get results which take work to optimize, so it saves me little time, if any. I admit I don't use paid versions of the A.I. stuff, so perhaps this is the reason.

I don’t use AI and “looking for a missing semicolon, typo, or off by 1 error, or manually combing logs” are the least of my problems.

Those are junior-tier problems, the bottleneck is always high-level architecture and deciding the best approach to a complex problem. One that AI still doesn’t solve. One that you don’t solve with more code.

> Now i get to focus on the fun parts of software engineering

I enjoyed those parts too, for multiple reasons. Typos often forced me to ask a colleague for a fresh pair of eyes (who'd almost always spot the problem immediately. Humbling, and great for team cohesion) manually running git bisect to isolate a problem helped me understand how different changesets interact, making me better at reviewing code. Debugging race conditions taught me resilience, and deepened my understanding of the code base, and the satisfaction from fixing a gnarly problem was fantastic. I also enjoyed gaining mastery and becoming the go-to person for a certain class of problem. These are all gone now, sacrificed on the altar of efficiency gains. Now it's "BTW, I noticed a subtle race condition while refactoring variable names, and fixed it. Review my 6,000 line diff now please."

The unexpected variety of activities gave texture to my working day, and was probably good for the brain. Does anyone actually achieve flow state while using agentic AI? I don't[1], and I hate it.

1. except occasionally during design, which isn't thr same. AI side quests inevitably overflow detailed mental models.

> we no longer have to worry about looking for a missing semicolon, typo, or off by 1 error,

These are all things that static analysis tools do very well. I have been using linters and type-checkers for almost my entire career that caught these things. For the past 10 years at least these tools have been integrated in my editor such that they highlight a typo, a missing semicolon, etc. as soon as I type them. This was never a real problem for me, and I assume most experienced software developers.

This post comes across as a carpenter who rejoices in the fact they no longer have to sharpen their tools because now finally, they can buy all their interiors from IKEA.

> Have a lead agent keep track of your work. With a real task tool. I can drive several projects at once. I finally (have an agent) keep my work journal updated.

Do you have an agent you can share for this? Sounds like something I'd like to try

Notice the linguistic thing while trying to dictate prompts. I can apparently type and listen to podcasts easily but not talk with podcasts on headphones. Brain just nopes

This precisely - AI takes away your leverage as a software engineer. AI models are very well trained at coding today so I'm not sure what further improvement really looks like. But even if humans stick around to guide the AI, I expect the job itself will get more unpleasant because capital/management have no reason to treat this labor class well anymore.

Scarier than that is the idea of replacing you with someone far cheaper who can drive the AI.

AI also gives employees much more leverage than before, as they no longer need a large team to compete with BigCos at knowledge work. It's never been cheaper to start a software business.

The key is the information environment and its reshaping, as you noted.

Every technology, even technologies that are, from the limited and naive perspective of the user, "free" (LLms can do what I used to do a lot faster than I can, and I don't need to maintain them right?) is not actually free. All technologies bring about their own demands and need for maintenance. Often they don't actually eliminate labor, they just shift it to new areas.

Consider LLMs. Even at the user level they have created their own information ecosystem and new grunt work and overhead. Now you have to prompt, you need to organize and manage context, skills, memory. You need to keep up with model releases. You need to be more vigilant reviewing things, the list goes on.

At a higher level they create even more toil, we need to maintain vast electrical supports and data infrastructure, data needs to be amassed continually for training, the information environment needs to be filtered and sorted more than ever as it gets flooded with slop.

This is the grand irony of technology. It's actually pretty rare for it to just be a total labor saving device. More often its real benefit is rearrangement of the world's structure and resources to move labor to more optimal places for certain needs (for example water supply systems).

This rearrangement also often rearranged financial resources and power. The big problem with LLMs today is that this aspect of the rearrangement is one of great concentration, and it's concerning (employers having a lot more power to extract labor from employees is one example)

We also don’t need 20x the software. My feeling is that the software industry has not been supply-constrained for at least a decade.

With the power of AI, soon all of us can be doing outstanding CRM tasks instead of wasting time enjoying nature. Imagine the time savings we could recover by removing all quiet contemplative moments!

But wouldn't it be nicer to have that walk without being plugged into your phone, and have less actual work to do when you sit down at the computer?

For those of us stuck in an office building, at a desk, AI models have enabled handling multiple tasks as a same time as fast as we can think. I'm absolutely doing multiple times the work I was doing before and the time between tasks is basically zero. Same pay, though, and drastically increased productivity and sense of effort.

> would be stuck behind my desk,

Or you would be unemployed and nervous about how you were going to pay your bills, replaced by someone willing to do the same work for lower cost while chained to said desk.

What seems better to you, seems a bit nightmarish to me. If I'm going for a walk, the last thing I want to have on my mind is dealing with CRM software in any way.

While giving instructions via mobile is useful, it's naive to think you'd have the same productivity as behind an actual desk.

But isn't the next step where your employer tasks you to codify all these tasks and capture your "process" and "reasoning" and then you can still walk on the beach all you want but you won't have work to do. Isn't the next step for a junior engineer or a single verifier to just add a minor human verification step at a higher level to remove you from the loop? I feel like there is not enough discussion about this mindset shift. Early adoption is taking away the employee moat that some people have but we don't seem to be considering that it is going to be recursive and repeating.

It reminds me of the 7-minute abs scene in Something About Mary.

Whats your setup? If I may ask

Yes of course your employer is fine with you going walking barefoot on a beach instead of being in the office working, and it's happy to pay you the same money. Come on...

Also, you are telling me that you can get only with voice interaction an AI to write well engineered and maintainable code, something I've yet to see an AI be able to do, to me the result that they tend is at best the same of a junior developer, except that the junior developer learns, the AI continues to make the same mistakes (because it's context is limited, when it's full it's full).

As someone with their own company, AI doesn't magically make things better. If anything, it makes it worse since you have far more competition from other people who are not good at programming but are good at sales/marketing.

Honestly, skimming through it, the writing style made it pretty obvious to that it had been written by an AI. Pangram also indicates that the text is "100% AI-generated." The disclaimer isn't even honest, I doubt AI helped to just build a "draft" of this article...

I know, this ship has long sailed, but I just can't get used and accept this kind of writing.

Hard agree on the prompting rabbit hole.

I've done it a handful of times, I'll get a little ambitious... "Oh, 6.1 Sol can totally handle this" and have it spin up a project, keep going, keep going.

Eventually, I get to a point where I start to do the homework and I have to step way back to "fully understand" the work from the ground up... It sucks, but I've largely stopped losing time to that.

For me, "pair programming" and incremental changes beats the "one shot" approach every single time.

We cannot seem to skip the stage of understanding (as much as some people on my team want to!)

> I obviously still have my iPhone and I sometimes take it on walks during the day if I want to have a productive walk, but it mostly stays plugged in in my drawer.

You and I have different definitions of a productive walk. To me a walk is productive if I get my heart beating fast. Bonus points if I see an unusual bird or insect.

I’m getting to that point of switching to a dumb phone. One thing I’ve done this week is completely not allow myself to respond to people/do any work even 1 minute after my scheduled end time. It’s wayyy too easy to do that these days.

Hm thats great insight. My phone contributes a loit to my phychosis and bursts. I check what my sessions are doing, i spin up new ones etc. If i distance my phone at least i ll stick more to the trad 9-5 schedule.

This reminds me that I absolutely love having a voice phone conversations in other words the old way. No video no battery drain simple high bandwidth voice to voice

> If the productivity benefit from AI is real, there's no reason you shouldn't be paid the same for less time because your output is the same/better.

That reasoning makes sense in a world where people are paid in proportion to the value they create. But it doesn't make sense in a world where supply and demand determine the price paid for something. Because if you can do the same work in less time in means you've actually increased the supply of producing things and thus decreased its worth.

> there's no reason you shouldn't be paid the same for less time because your output is the same/better.

The reason is economic growth for the company / the country.

This in turn is a more subtle point than it seems at first glance. Not having economic growth isn't really a desirable option for a company, a country, or in (the long run) the people involved.

That worked great for US and German car companies. They're really competitive now.

Same impression here: things "done" are going faster, bigger, more complex, and the head has to keep up

Yes! This removes a lot of initial resistance, it removes the fear of something not working, so it's easy to "wash the first dish."

I've been throwing it at a homelab as well as I don't have to worry about production stuff and can revert snapshots fine.

Until the agents decide to start messing with snapshots.

It can help if you can't remember where something is, but then you'll never learn so I try to action everything myself, but again agents like to just blab on constantly and overstep.

I found I was doing bulk changes etc with it, seemed helpful until I realised I could just use dsh as Ive done in the past and basically do the same thing with way less resources and more consistency.

It's a laugh for now, whilst its "free".

Jevon's paradox is the first thing I thought of as well after reading the title.

and you put words outta my mouth with your comment.

Counter perspective: I like talking to the machine. Often times I learn.

I don’t have a complex system of agents buzzing around doing my work for me. I’m sure I’d be more productive (from company standpoint) if I did. Does this not result in some inherent level of mental/skill degradation though? Or at least skill transfer away from code and fundamentals/architecture/design and towards configuring autonomous systems?

But someone in the same business field as yours, who, instead of spending time on personal projects, is working on the business itself, will be ahead of you.

Same. Once I actually tweaked my agent to do all the same work I used to do by hand, I now do so little work that I often try to think of ways to performatively imply that I’m working hard out of fear that maybe someone will catch on and I’ll just get fired out and replaced with my agent once and for all.

A neat trick I’ve found is that I can just invent random work for myself in the form of building custom tools and skills for various workflows and write it off as research.

>I now have the luxury of concentrating on ... writing articles for the blog

I ran a AI detector through your blog and most of it is written by AI.

Love this, and it's the outcome I was hoping for. Did you have to deliberately cap your hours, or did it just happen? For me the cheap extra capacity always gets filled with another idea.

I work remotely and i feel my hours did go up, not just my output, because the extra capacity keeps getting filled with new ideas that i can also control from my phone and keep being kinda engaged. Its not that i am required to be physically all the time on my pc more. Its that i get to be more hours engaged? does that make sense?

I agree the headcount side is the scarier part. Especially if/when we run out of ideas or experiments.

Correct. Too many people are ignorant of the mid 1800s in the US. As industrial technology improved the robber barons reaped massive wealth while the average worker worked 14 hours a day. It took literal wars to get worker rights.

They aren’t paying more for productivity because they themselves aren’t earning more for productivity. The elephant in the room is that customers don’t have any more money to spend. Certainly not in this economy.

In manufacturing, an oversupply of finished product quickly leads to overfull warehouses, and the company knows to slow down production until product moves.

In software it’s less visible. Features that nobody is buying don’t physically pile up in the shipping department. Decades of accounting for all programmer time as productivity has left managers with limited ability to recognize time spent building unnecessary bloat as a loss. Maintenance burden isn’t fully recognized as a loss, either. We tend to assume it’s roughly equivalent to profit, the same as all other code the programmers churn out.

And what you are seeing now is that it was always a myth. Not everything you do at work is profitable or productive, and AI is causing that fraction to decrease. So of course they aren’t going to pay you more for it.

No cuts at all, the team's all still there. I've always stayed close to the code. Partly that's because Bold.org is small enough that the line between leading and building is thin, and partly because it's how I keep myself up to date about how we can reduce complexity and make things better in the product in general. A lot of my technical work is a lot of tickets which in the past would be in the drawer. Like small bugs, architecture improvements, code debt etc. The team focused on shipping the features and new things etc.

What are you paid for and by whom? Aren't you afraid that others might provide that work for cheaper or better?

Probably because you are self employed.

but it wasn't the industrial revolution per se, but instead workers movements fighting for more social environments

> I don't know how people are handling constant context switching

The answer is they don't. It has been proven overwhelmingly that human's are bad a multitasking, even the ones who think they are good multitaskers.

I mean my own boss's stance a year ago was something akin to:

'You should be able to work 7x as hard now'

Not sure where he got the multiplier, but I gently tried to educate him what AI actually does and does not do over time.

See the discussion above https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50259040 unfortunately a [dead] post but still all the links are relevant. Elon, Dario, and Sam promised this.

Let me see, Dario, Elon, Altman. Do I need to go on?

frangonf below me brought the receipts too. Unfortunately flagged as [dead]

Good question, let's take a look:

https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/elon-musk-ai-eventual...

https://www.newsweek.com/ceos-predict-shorter-working-week-1...

https://tech.co/news/ceo-predicts-shorter-workweek-ai#:~:tex...

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-04-05/chatgpt-op...

https://www.businessinsider.com/vinod-khosla-5-year-olds-won...

https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-comments-3-day-wo...

https://www.businessinsider.com/jpmorgan-ceo-jamie-dimon-ai-...

https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-cohen-4-day-workweek-a...

or the cognitive strain from trying to understand and rubberstamp a word salad is bigger than working through problems

Stay in school.

No. Actually some things take longer and lead to worse outcomes. AI tools invent problems and find work for themselves while also failing at their stated tasks in opaque ways all the damn time. It's obnoxious and why so many repos are stupidly large for no good reason.