alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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Isn’t the grander question why on earth people would tolerate, let alone desire, more hours of work every day?
The older I get, the more I see the wisdom in the ancient ideas of reducing desires and being content with what one has.
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Later Addition:
The article's essential answer is that workers voluntarily embraced (and therefore tolerated) the longer hours because of the novelty of it all. Reading between the lines, this is likely to cause shifts in expectation (and ultimately culture) — just when the novelty wears off and workers realize they have been duped into increasing their work hours and intensity (which will put an end to the voluntary embracing of those longer hours and intensity). And the dreaded result (for the poor company, won't anyone care about it?!) is cognitive overload, hence worker burnout and turnover, and ultimately reduced work quality and higher HR transaction costs. Therefore, TFA counsels, companies should set norms regarding limited use of generative language models (GLMs, so-called "AI").
I find it unlikely that companies will limit GLM use or set reasonable norms: instead they'll crack the whip!
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Even Later Addition:
As an outsider, I find it at once amusing and dystopian to consider the suggestions offered at the end of the piece: in the brutalist, reverse-centaur style, workers are now to be programmed with modifications to their "alignment … reconsider[ation of] assumptions … absor[ption of] information … sequencing … [and] grounding"!
The worker is now thought of in terms of the tool, not vice versa.
While I agree with the idea that prompting is easier to get started, is it actually less work. More hours doesn't mean they're equally as productive. More, lower quality hours just makes work:life balance worse with nothing to show for it.
I agree. However, for me, I'm finding that I'm drastically leveling up what I'm doing in my day to day. I'm a former founder and former Head of Engineering, back in an IC role.
The coding is now assumed "good enough" for me, but the problem definition and context that goes into that code aren't. I'm now able to spend more time on the upstream components of my work (where real, actual, hard thinking happens) while letting the AI figure out the little details.
> I can pretty easily do a 12h day of prompting
Do you want to though?
That's a bingo.
Additionally, I can eke out 4 hrs really deep diving nowadays, and have structured my workday around that, delegating low-mental-cost tasks to after that initial dive. Now diving is a low enough mental cost that I can do 8-12hrs of it.
It's a bicycle. Truly.
>so on average one can work longer days if they're prompting than if they were coding
It's 2026 for god's sake. I don't want to work __longer__ days, I want to work __shorter__ days.
If you're in the office for 12h it won't matter if you're proompting, pushing pens or working your ass off. You gave that company 12h of your life. You're not getting those back.
For me it’s the opposite. Coding I enter flow and can do 5 hours at a stretch while barely noticing.
Prompting has so many distractions and context switches I get sick of it after an hour.