AI promised less work. I've never worked more

This resonates 100% with me. I am tired too.

This is what I think is the solution - I've tried it a few times with good results.

1. We need our own project or task plan. A simple forward-thinking TODO list is good enough. This needs to be prepared before the day begins. Daily.

2. Focus and limit scope. Focusing on doing ONLY what's on the list is the discipline I (we) lack and which we need badly.

3. Side quests are killing us. Allowing ourselves to veer off the planned daily tasks should require a complete away-from-the-keyboard planning session with pen and paper. Print it out but plan it away from the LLM. Use the LLM to summarise the problem, by all means, but do the thinking away from the LLM. The current TODO list needs to be the main input of such a deliberation. The output is the new TODO list. The objective of this away-from-keyboard exercise is simply to maintain control of the next steps.

On days where I worked with my TODO lists, I clocked out and joined the family for activities, slept sooner and better. On days I lost control of that list, the exhaustion mounted almost on the same day.

Make a finite list for the day, tick it off and go spend time with the missus, the kids or the dog. 2c.

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.

Sure we have to do a lot more work, but i would say it is less mundane than it was. Now i get to focus on the fun parts of software engineering. I think the burnout some of us are feeling is because as the author has said we don't know how to properly use the tool.

Those techniques will come with time through us using the tools, and coming up with the standard for how to use it for the most productivity gains. For instance how many of us, when manually coding, have to have headphones with noise cancellation, or use the pomodoro technique to get things done. I imagine soon we will have similar techniques for working properly with AI.

>Not because any single task is harder. Because there are so many more of them, all at once.

There's a nuance here since the author says "Almost all of this is private work," but this is basically the entire premise of Cory Doctorow's excellent The Reverse Centaur's Guide To Life After AI, which everyone should read. If I may quote:

>>In automation theory (the academic study of automation), a centaur is a person who is assisted by a machine. Think of a clever human's head, arms, and hands atop a horse's strong body. Riding a bicycle or driving a car makes you a centaur; so does using the mute button on your TV remote when an ad comes on. Wearing a hearing aid makes you a centaur, and so does using a calculator to multiply large numbers. Being a centaur can be glorious.... Best of all, I get to choose exactly which of these features I use.... No one expects me to write more pages when I get a new tool.

[snip]

>>A reverse centaur is a human who is conscripted into acting as an assistant to a machine. There's a classic I Love Lucy episode where Lucy and Ethel are working on an assembly line at a chocolate factory, taking bonbons off the belt and wrapping them in paper. As the belt goes taster and faster, Lucy and Ethel have to work at superhuman speed. They're reverse centaurs: the machine can move the chocolates from one place to another, but it needs a human to pack them into the box, and the humans who act as its assistant are made to work at a pace that exceeds all human capacity until calamity ensues.

"More tasks all at once" is exactly the premise of that I Love Lucy episode.

I think AI has also devalued a lot of work that previously might have been "mundane" but still felt like an accomplishment once you got it done. But now you can do that work to an ±80% quality level of the old, manual way, but in 1% of the time.

So the result is noticeably worse, but you basically must do it, because the efficiency gains are inescapable. This makes the work seem even more pointless, adding to the feeling that you're working more and accomplishing less.

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?

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.

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.

Why? I’m self employed and I just work in the morning now. Can get so much done by lunch that’s there’s no need to keep going and then I read, cycle, play music, learn…

I notice I am doing more work as well but enjoying it and taking more time to recharge. I stopped listening to podcasts and audio books while working because before, my linguistic brain had time to linger while puzzling. Now I’m reading and writing letters and memos all day in addition to that other puzzle solving mode. No mental bandwidth for those extra things.

And multitasking is easier with ai. 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.

I do miss raw coding sometimes. But if I am honest most of what I did was filling in boilerplate code that was not really new or interesting. The real thinking was not the code itself. The code was a means.

I used to worry about who will learn coding anymore but seeing how I can push into new types of systems now, my worry is reduced. Kids will just have really awesome assistants who can explain it all in the way they prefer.

From a higher level view, and not just about the article I note that:

- Automation seems to make specific individuals work more, the leverage makes the individual more valuable in the short run (eg if I can produce 10x the engineering, for a little while I'm 10x more valuable, I dont mean LoC but engineering value). But in the long run its deflationary on the value of what I do, I might have to work harder just to stay in place.

- Automation/industrialization spins the hedonic treadmill. Economists ~100 years ago thought we'd all work like 5 hours a week or something because, for example, 95% of the farmers would be replaced with machines etc. However what they didn't/couldnt account for was us increasing our consumption as fast as the productivity improvements. Before today I had use for approximately 1 GPU (gaming), now I'm probably using dozens or hundreds. George Monboit also notes this with "green" technologies, that we end up consuming more such that we approximately end up with the same pollution (co2, plastic, whatever).

- Software has long been a negotiation between Manager/Executive class and the maker class about what an appropriate amount of software per week/40 hours was. They think because claude writes code 95% faster we should ship 20x the software. But they miss that coding was only 10-25% of the job. (numbers made up to illustrate idea, someone chime in with the data please!)

AI give employers immense leverage - by threading with AI layoffs they can exploit workers and in the current job market many have nowhere to go.

"The pitch was that AI would give us our time back." <= this was never the case. The pitch is that AI will either augment people to make them much much more productive or replace them altogether.

For decades tech companies have promised that devices save time....but to do what? The pitch was that they would save time for us to do more 'creative stuff'...but I think that pitch and idea is fundamentally flawed. From doing creative stuff for a couple decades, I can make a few observations:

(1) More tech doesn't save time if it's developed in the direction/dimension of more information flow. Because it seems that the best environment for creativity is a somewhat restricted environment of information. And if one needs to engage with information to take advantage of this new tech, it actually impedes creativity.

(2) A lot of the grunt work that we seem to be automating also encourages creativity. From what I've observed from many artists and programmers (I hang out with both), it seems that creativity strikes best when it's not forced, and the "downtime" doing grunt work actually accelerates it.

So I think that AI breaks these two principles (minimal information and the removal of the crucial grunt work), and actually makes us work more for less.

The only gains seem to be those short-term kinds (a program can be made faster, rewards can be reaped by senior people who have thought about stuff for a while), rather than encouraging a healthy environment of creativity....

I may not work less, but certainly different and better. Just this morning I went for a long walk on the beach, barefoot in the water. Using nothing but voice interaction, I handled a couple of outstanding CRM tasks, sorted out some accounting issues and upgraded my search infrastructure (SearXNG) and most of all enjoyed my walk outside. I would not be able to do all this without AI and would be stuck behind my desk, daydreaming about going for that walk instead.

> AI helped me pull and analyze my GitHub contribution data, build the chart and draft this article.

It did more than draft the article - it’s literally 100% AI written. I gave up trying to read it after a minute.

AI companies did promise that, and for some time back in 2024 and early 2025 it did feel so to me. I just had a kid and suddenly could not work the extra hour every day I used to, but kept producing as usual.

Nowadays I’m receiving longer emails than usual and longer code to review. Less spelling errors, but long and pointless prose. Less superficial bugs but more sneaky, fundamental problems.

There is also the trap where you go from 0-80% immediately but end up spending time anyway fixing the last 20%, and it’s unclear if there was a benefit or loss in productivity. Sometimes the almost there rabbit hole of prompting can be misleading.

Next time put the AI disclaimer at the top of the article so that I can avoid reading it while having a meal.

AI is increasing productivity. Companies are positioned to leverage this, employees are not, as they'll still work the same hours, maybe now producing more.

The way to better leverage this is to build your own company, I know this is not as simple as saying it but the gap is widening and it doesn't look good for employees.

I never thought about it like that but I totally agree we are multitasking and working multiple projects more than ever before.

At work, we started piloting Copilot inside VSCode in December 2023 and we always were slow to allow new models at work before sign off from security so in the first two years developing wasn't that different because I was still coding more by hand than with the Claude models at that time because they made so many mistakes involving large enterprise scale monolithic projects.

Now its like a switch was flipped in 2026 with the new models actually making less mistakes and able to produce more working code. This year, projects exploded because it was then possible to write custom full stack applications to replace applications like Nexus Repository and Postman that normally cost us money in licensing and subscriptions. So now I'm managing existing projects AND side projects at work to help us manage everything and save money. Then this has caused me to start creating side projects at home. This year with the Claude models the way they are has been total project chaos.

The past century of promised reductions in work fall under the assumption that competitors will mutually agree to not use the excess time to compete against each other.

I recently made a change because I felt the same way. I think it was primarily my phone. I had my full agent setup accessible via my phone and was able to be as productive as being on my machine wherever I was. This made it so any thought, or tickle of the mind resulted in me whipping out my phone, firing off a prompt, and iterating until it got it right.

I switched to a dumb flip phone as my primary device and now my work mostly only gets done on my computer during work hours. 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.

I always thought I wanted to be constantly connected to my dev environment and be able to work from anywhere, but it turns out that adds way too much noise to my life and is a net negative. I was constantly thinking about work and then able to act on those thoughts so the cycle just continued until I fell asleep.

Technological innovations have never meant less work for the worker. It's the bosses/company that benefit from being able to squeeze you that little bit more.

Want to do less work? Join a union and campaign for a 4-day work week or something. 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.

the amount of work I get done increased exponentially, but so did the number of things I have to keep track of in my head. it's tempting to just YOLO everything to the AI, but "the AI did it" isn't really an excuse when production goes down.

Kind of surprised not to find any instance of the string "jevon" in either the article or the comments here already. Even with the assumption that AI decreases the amount of work needed for writing software (which people may disagree on of course), Jevon's paradox seems like it would still apply; maybe making more stuff feasible more easily just means management has higher expectations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Definitely working as much as ever but I must say that AI does make it about zero stress for me because delivering isn't really a question at this point.

The hours we work is 100% social convention (and balance of power) it has nothing to do with tech.

Anyone who thinks AI is immune to the same promise made by all major technologies of the last 150 years needs a little more...experience.

No technology helps you work less. It changes the amount of work one person can output. Once a person can do more, an employer will require more.

I really don't understand some of the comments here. I've honestly been automating so much of my work that I spend most of my days working on personal projects and checking in on what's being done on my behalf by AI. This, of course, after spending a few weeks setting up validation tools so I can trust the output.

I use ai as I program every day and I find it useful. I also use it for tech support for myself and my home server. The other day I used it to make some changes in my server and I felt like I accomplished tons. But when I thought about it in the evening I realized I could have got it done with less time if I had just read some documents - the ai advice was often out-of-date and I notice that while programming too - for example, I use the spring-ai framework which has changed massively between versions and the ai always gives old advice....

So on average I would say I'm getting about as much work done now as before ai.

No one with a brain thought that we would be "working less". We are working more efficient, so we are expected to produce more output in the same amount of time.

My experience has been wildly different.

The way I tell this to people is "I have never worked less and I have never been more productive".

Candidly, though, in my experience, when I've seen other people work with AI, I can see them aligning more with the author than me.

All of my effort goes into ensuring that agents work autonomously for days to weeks without me having to coddle them. This takes a lot of effort to ensure that my memories are pruned, my git logs are clean, that I've transferred my way of thinking to agents so that they can make autonomous decisions which are 60-80% aligned with what I would want.

And the reason I go with 60-80% is that's the level of alignment I expect to get from my product & engineering teams, in a given sprint/period. Like with them, I've accepted that I'm not the perfect solution and it's going to go through a few iterations before I shape it into what I want it to be.

If people are designing workflows which require them to constantly chat with their models, then I can see why they would feel burnt out because it's an absolute drag talking to the machine.

Fearless prediction: At some point, this dynamic—-i.e., running to keep up with the AI and providing directions when you catch it or when asked by it, with little creative work in between--will slow. Without human creativity, focus, and the resulting code, ideas, text, and stories to steal, LLMs are essentially helpless.

Tech never begets less work. Tech only generates more work because the mindset is always to optimize and maximize. Now that something can work 24/7, you must be available 24/7 to keep it working.

And that's why it on you as a employee to work the least amount you can.

I have a coworker who is possibly 1000 times more productive. He went from working on 1 or 2 side projects on his own pre-AI to working on 10-15 side projects at the same time, each incredibly complex and finishing them in a week. He build Android apps for controlling drones, then to 3D-rendering, then to making games, to creating various types of compilers, to creating entire AI run-times for phones. This is on top of running out of work to do so he's been doing side projects at work. He rewrote an entire team's product in a week and made it faster with less lines of code. Then he created his own language, made an AI music generator, an AI thing that compresses KV cache, multiple MCP servers for products, and then a global MCP-type server that incorporates a while slew of internal services kind of like a one-stop shop, and it has gained traction within our company.

It's insane and almost comical the level of productivity he has achieved with AI.

AI is concentrating work. Fewer and fewer people are working like never before ("I've never worked more"), while a massive number of people are not working at all. Exhibit 1: Microsoft's layoff of 25% of its workforce this week.

The capitalist system has no intrinsic solution to this problem---in fact, it's blind to the problem. There is no problem from the capitalist perspective, this is progress! The solution has to come from outside, through public policy.

The promise of "less work" won't happen until society reorganizes around the recognition that most people no longer need to work. Realizing that reorganization will be the defining struggle of our generation.

Entire article is AI-written

Maybe it is actually saving him time!

If you're an employee, that's true - but as a founder of a small SaaS (https://arcentry.com) I genuinely work about 1-2 hours less and get more time walking with my dog through nature. I now have the luxury of concentrating on building the core product and writing articles for the blog and AI handles the things I'm less good at or passionate about, including marketing and content distribution, accounting, building the website (which admittedly looks a bit AI-y, but still much better than my handmade version), answering simple customer requests and escalating complicated ones to me and so on.

Meanwhile, I get to do more of what I enjoy. Of course, it's always tempting to let Codex work on the core product itself - but I resisted that urge so far as I feel a strong sense of ownership and craftsmanship - plus its the thing I actually like doing.

Isn’t it possible we perceive we are doing more work just because we are producing more output, closing more tickets, and releasing more features? Of you’re still sitting in the desk giving the same brain hours to the work, then you’re doing the same amount of work, in some reasonable sense

This is also where is makes sense for “the company to expect MoRe WoRk FoR tHe SaMe PaY?!?”

But, this model does (likely) result a reduced need for headcount. That’s the scary part. People complaining about putting in the same hours and being chaffed that they get the same pay for more productivity is bupkis. But people getting cannned or unable to find work, I really feel for them.

Who is doing the promising and why did you listen to them? Did they write it in blood? These statements are strange. It's a way to place vague blame, and remove the onus of critical thought from oneself.

If your employer lets you chill, their competitors will not, and win. That's how it goes.

Prompting and reading detailed AI output all day long, trying to tease apart the goods and bads - it's extremely exhausting. You don't get the mental breaks of pressing the compile or test button, or doing small refactors like pulling a logic into its own function. Coding is gone as a pleasure at work.

Stupid question maybe but why is a VP of Technology doing technical work? Aren't they supposed to be in meetings with stakeholders, management and their direct reports all the time? As manager your job is to delegate and manage people, not do the work (or direct an AI to do the work) yourself - unless this is a case of layers underneath the author getting fired and made redundant so more work ends up in their lap?

We are encouraged to, and I do, use our tokens not for "throughput" but mostly for increasing quality.

We are basically not limited by the time it takes to write code, we never were. But we ARE limited in the time it takes to wrote ancillary code: CI and testing code being the biggest, but also tools.

Iv'e started on 2 bigger sub-projects that could help with coverage and finding really hard bugs that I would _never_ have even touched before, becuase I could never have fitted it with my regular work that actually has high priority.

This is entirely AI written; clearly, this author is so busy that they now need to delegate their writing to AI, too!

> The pitch was that AI would give us our time back

The pitch was that same amount of work would be delivered 10 times faster. Meaning you would do 10 times more work in the same time span.

No employer will ever pitch you 4 hour work week, only Tim Ferriss.

The thing I'm starting to see now is that managers believe AI is what enables all this stuff to be done, not the people actually driving it.

Even though everyone has the same tools and it can clearly be seen not everyone has the same output.

I never saw that promise. What's the source?

I'm running a small software company together with a partner. We've moved from partly working with externals to 100% working with onpremise AI.

Both of us feel the AI fatigue from time to time.

My personal analysis is that the speed went up, with this the bandwith of different topics. Other factors that weigh in are a not lowering learning curve inside the heavily iterating AI sector and the chattiness of the Agents. If not stopped they produce so much facts that it kills me. I started constantly working on this to stop the waterfall of facts and get ontop of it.

Still not succeeded :)

At least the industrial revolution gave us 5-day workweeks (instead of 6-day).

> Write less boilerplate, delegate the boring parts, go home earlier.

This is fundamentally misunderstanding how capitalism works.

Whoever owns your company pays you as little as possible but as much as necessary, as long as it is profitable. If they don't pay you enough, you leave. If you don't produce enough, they fire you.

There is no "they have enough now, so you get paid more or you can work less".

It is fundamentally adversarial: the whole game is for you to convince them that you are worth as much as possible, and for them to pay you as little as possible. They will lie to you for that, you should be prepared to do the same.

As for the github "contributions". It wasn't ever a good metric (because... metrics), but it has never meant less. With AI, I can generate 10x more commits, and it doesn't mean I produce more value.

Better AI -> Labor is more expendable -> Employers demand more from workers

The Great Irony

This tracks with my experience. The other bit that contributes here is that upstream inputs using AI also get faster - so you’re basically speeding up the entire machine but you’re still a human.

Unfortunately this means that you always feel the need to keep building or fall behind (picturing Lucy and Ethel at the chocolate factory) which means you’re pretty much always feeling burnt out and it feels harder to step away than ever before without feeling a certain way about it.

I hate it. It’s the best time ever to build. That excitement lasted about a year - but now it’s a treadmill I can’t escape and companies are not really paying more for the productivity (even factoring in the cost of my AI usage)