This technology should be liberatory, and allow us all to work less while enjoying the same standard of living. We've all contributed in its development by creating the whole corpus of the internet, without which it could never have been bootstrapped.

The only reason we can't expect this is that we live under a system that is arranged for the sole benefit of the owners of capital, and have been convinced that this is an immutable state of affairs or that our own personal advantage can be found in making a Faustian bargain with it.

I’m a remote work from home employee who never ever works overtime.

I do use Claude code for my personal projects and ping at them from coffee shops and micro moments during my free time.

It’s possible to engineer your own life boundaries and not be a victim of every negative trend in existence.

This is a complete fantasy. If LLM's got to this point of sophistication there would be a total revolution in almost every industry. Society would be radically different. Since LLM's are nowhere near this, I'm not so sure we even have Pandora's box, let alone opened it.

> white collar workers will be working 24/7

Where we're going, there's no "white collars workers" anymore.

Only white collars Claude agents.

It's utterly unreal to me to hear so little discussion about labor organization within software during these nascent moments of LLM deployment. Software engineers seem totally resigned toward reduced salary and employment instead of just organizing labor while still in control of the development of these systems.

I really don't get it -- is it that people think these technologies will be so transformative that it is most moral to race toward them? I don't see much evidence of that, it's just future promises (especially commensurate with the benefit / cost ratio). When I do use this tech it's usually edutainment kind of curiosity about some subject matter I don't have enough interest in to dive into--it's useful and compelling but also not really necessary.

In fact, I don't really think the tech right now is at all transformative, and that a lot of folks are unable to actually gauge their productivity accurately when using these tools; however, I do not believe that the technology will stay that way, and it will inevitably start displacing people or degrading labor conditions within the only economically healthy remaining tranche of people in America: the white collar worker.

Did they say the same when Email took over? Or Slack?

That sounds more like the fault of shitty managers who would find a way to make you work 24/7, with or without Claude Code "On-the-Go".

The answer is boundaries

If I get emails outside of work hours and they're not urgent - I reply during work hours. This is no different

Burnt out workers are far less productive so win-win for everyone

> It won't matter if I'm washing the dishes, walking the dog, driving to the supermarket, picking up my kids from school. I'll always be switched on, on my phone, continuously talking to an LLM, delivering questionable features and building meaningless products, destroying in the process the environment my kids are going to have to grow in.

I remember hearing similar criticisms of continuous delivery. On one end of the spectrum people who had to wait months to get changes out now got them out relatively quickly. On the other end of the spectrum, some person was going to push changes at midnight.

A decade on forward I've never actually worked at a shop that at scale did continuous delivery in its truest sense where changes go straight to production. Simply, nothing beats a human in the loop; it's always about balancing the costs of automation and a lower barrier to entry. I imagine this kind of thing, if it ever actually takes hold and can be adopted by a larger subset of engineers, will follow a similar path.

Long way of saying, I don't think you're Chicken Little but also don't start breathing into a bag just yet.

The difference here is, you type a command into your phone at 3pm. Put it down to go play with your kid for 3hours. Type a new one in at 9pm before bed where you’ve been binging your wife’s favorite show. Then you wake up at 10am to a holistic transformation in your business that would’ve taken months previously in your career. But whatever, another command and it’s off to 11am frisbee.

>But the cognitive dissonance I feel when I think about what this means over a longer time horizon is really painful.

Excluding work (where granted, some companies are dictating the use of llms) and trying not to sound uncaring or disrespectful, but have you thought about not using llms for everything and using the old grey cells? Not having answers to every whimsical thought might be a good thing.

It's very easy to relax the brain (and be lazy tbh) with llms and it's scary to think what will happen in the next 4 years in terms of personal cognitive ability (or as a society).

e.g. I've noticed (and probably most have here) that the world is full of zombies glued to their phones. Looking over their shoulder (e.g. on a train, yeah it's a bit rude but I'm the curious type), they are doom scrolling or playing waste-time games (insert that boomer meme in Las Vegas with slot machines [0]). I try to use my phone as little as possible (especially for dog walks) and feel better for it, allowing me to daydream and let boredom take over.

Maybe I'm fortunate to be able to do this (gen-x: having grown up before cell phones/internet), but worth stating in case anyone wants to try.

[0]: https://tenor.com/view/casino-oldpeople-oldpeopleonslots-slo...

The LLMs have successfully domesticated humans.

No thanks. I'm so glad I'm getting closer to retirement age. From a young age, all I wanted to do was program computers. _I_ wanted to do it. Not have some tool do it for me. There's no fun or interest or ... anything that comes from that. I want to solve the problems. I want to write the code. It's what I am good at and it's incredibly enjoyable to me. Why the fuck would I ever give that up?

But, the world is changing. Y'all can have it... in a few short years. ;)

Had the same feeling many moons ago when they gave me an office smartphone where email from the company was available 24/7. At the beginning was answering emails at midnight, nowadays couldn't care less. Just wait until work hours.

You'll likely get used to this new thing too.

Hum, I already have a phone with Slack / Email on. And it's only switched on during work hours. No messaging outside of that window. Why would that be different?

That reminds me of my father calling the mobile phone and laptop issued to him as the "dunce kit", so he could work at home as well. He used to say that since the 90s, ahaha.

You can do that if you want. Ill refuse. Ill take a manual labor job doing basically anything else for 40 hours a week over what your describing.

You can just say no.

Are there really that many “things to do” that anyone, let alone everyone, will need to work that way?

This was the end game with or without AI. It was always going to result in a zero-sum game because the factories that are open around the clock can output more products - which is exactly why a lot of manufacturing has non stop shift work. If you don’t, you’re leaving money on the table and a competitor will gladly take it.

When you saw 996 being talked about it should have set a few alarm bells off, because it started a countdown timer until such a work culture surpasses the rather leisurely attitude of the West in terms of output and velocity. West cannot compete against that no matter how many “work smarter, not harder” / “work to live don’t live to work” aphorisms it espouses. This should be obvious by now (in hindsight).

You can blame LLM or capitalism or communism but the hard matter is, it’s a money world and people want to have as much of it as they possibly can, and you and your children can’t live without it, and every day someone is looking to have more of it than you are. This isn’t even getting into the details of the personality types that money and power attracts to these white collar leadership roles.

Best of luck to you.

Seems more likely that that won't happen

You have a profound amount of certainty about such an absurdly dystopian vision.

Why is that?

This has been like this forever. Change is that software engineers, historically spoiled and expensive is going to have a brutal reality check - aka we will work just everyone else.

People need to start having conversations about existential risk here. Hinton, Nobel Prize winner in AI, thinks there's a decent chance AI executes the entire human species. This isn't some crank idea.