Talking about "productivity" is a red herring.

Are the people leveraging LLMs making more money while working the same number of hours?

Are the people leveraging LLMs working fewer hours while making the same amount of money?

If neither of these are true, then LLMs have not made your life better as a working programmer.

I feel this. Since my team has jumped into an AI everything working style, expectations have tripled, stress has tripled and actual productivity has only gone up by maybe 10%.

It feels like leadership is putting immense pressure on everyone to prove their investment in AI is worth it and we all feel the pressure to try to show them it is while actually having to work longer hours to do so.

I laughed at all the Super Bowl commercials showing frazzled office workers transformed into happy loafers after AI has done all their work for them...

There's an old saying among cyclists attributed to Greg Lemond: "It doesn't get easier, you just go faster"

I don't think it's super complicated. I think that prompting takes generally less mental energy than coding by hand, so on average one can work longer days if they're prompting than if they were coding.

I can pretty easily do a 12h day of prompting but I haven't been able to code for 12h straight since I was in college.

> If AI was so good at reducing work, why is it every company engaging with AI has their workload increase.

Isn't it simple?

Because of competition, which is increased because of entry barrier is lowered a lot for building new software products.

You output a lot, so do your competition.

> If AI was so good at reducing work, why is it every company engaging with AI has their workload increase.

Heavy machinery replaces shovels. It reduces workload on the shovel holders, However, someone still needs to produce the heavy machinery.

Some of these companies are shovel holders, realizing they need to move up stream. Some of these companies are already upstream, racing to bring a product to market.

The underlying bet for nearly all of these companies is "If I can replace one workflow with AI, I can repeat that with other workflows and dominate"

Same story with hardware and software. Hardware gets more efficient and faster, so software devs shove more CPU intensive stuff into their applications, or just go lazy and write inefficient code.

The software experience is always going to feel about the same speed perceptually, and employers will expect you to work the same amount (or more!)

I think you're missing the point. The folks pushing 996 (and willingly working 996) feel like they are in a land rush, and that AI is going to accelerate their ability "take the most amount of land" No one is optimizing for the "9 to 5" oriented engineer.

> If AI was so good at reducing work, why is it every company engaging with AI has their workload increase.

Throughout human history, we have chosen more work over keeping output stable.

Maybe ask the friendly AI about reducing project scope? But we probably won’t if we’re having too much fun.

Many people in silicon valley truly Believe that AI will take over everything. Therefore, this is the last chance to get in so you better be working really really hard.

There's a palpable desperation that makes this wave different from mobile or cloud. It's not about making things better so much as its about not being left behind.

I'm not sure of the reason for this shift. It has a lot of overlap with the grindset culture you see on Twitter where people caution against taking breaks because your (mostly imaginary) competition may catch up with you.

Jevons Paradox applies to labor.

now everyone gets to be a manager !

996 is a Chinese term, not American.

There is a lot of work to do, just because you are doing more work with your time doesn’t mean you can somehow count that as less work.