alt Hacker NewsAI promised less work. I've never worked more
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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)
Capitalism doesn't work like that. The promise of "less work" is only possible if you're the only one that can unlock those productivity gains, but if your competitors are also able to access those gains, they will eat your marketshare if you just work less.
The whole post is just a deep misunderstanding of what it means to live in capitalist societies.
Computers were supposed to reduce paper flow in business. For quite awhile the amount of printed paper was increased. This will follow that path and it will take some time if ever to stabilize.
AI promised less work for given output. Same as any technological change ever. And same as any previous advancement, it immediately increased output of existing/known things.
And it largely seems to be delivering on that?
I don't know how people are handling constant context switching - ok, I can trigger 5 agents that work on different things. One comes back to me citing a decision I've made 30m ago; then another, citing a finding to something it mentioned 45m ago; then another, then another. In every one of these cases agents are unhelpful as all hell - they overcommunicate, lie, scope creep, expect you to pay attention to every single thing they mention in passing. You've created a plan? Fuck you - agent has exceeded the plan with 2 items. You ask about these two items? It's actually 8. Ok, what are these 8 items. Sorry, I was wrong, it was 10. And in the background there are 4 agents now waiting for your decision, where you have to familiarise yourself what they were doing and what were the decisions that you've made.
the end is here
In jest: It is less work for those laid off.
For those still employed—buckle up!
I think AI did not promise less work. It promised more productivity and gains due to productivity for the organization.
996 already became the new normal, it just wasn't evenly distributed. The perceived latency was mostly in the end-output, but you can see it happening as China became dominant not through scientific breakthroughs or discoveries, but through raw unopposed effort put in. Even if two people can't do the work of one, throwing five or ten people at the problem will work.
Now with LLMs which can effectively work nonstop, the only remaining bottleneck is whoever has to be around to approve or otherwise take control.
Biggest issue that gets lost is the slower mundane parts of development were/are a very valuable forcing function to think about wtf you are even doing and making.
Even with AI, you need that time. So I've drawn a line in sand with management that, no, I won't be rushed along and hurry up on those important parts, even with AI speeding some things up.
As long as you're not working __for__ the AI ...
If this even needs to be said, OP’s experience as a Principal Engineer and VP of Technology is not a typical experience. I would expect a VP of Technology to be a very high-stress job.
But I would also expect a VP of Technology to stop doing technical work and start being a strategic leader. This is a huge mistake on OP’s part, and one that first-time strategic leaders who come from an engineering background make frequently.
You are a VP now, it's time to delegate your work. You are most valuable for your guidance on the overarching direction of your platform, not for doing IC work.
> A note on how this article was written: AI helped me pull and analyze my GitHub contribution data, build the chart and draft this article. The experience, decisions and opinions are mine.
Carefully omitted: who or what actually produced the text.
This is just a dishonest way of saying he had a ghostwriter.
The promise was that fewer workers could do the same amount of work, or even more
seems obvious in hindsight that if you double the productivity of the builder, then the customer will want the wall twice as tall.
Ditch diggers complaining that the steam shovel makes them lay more pipe.
Couple options: learn to operate the hoe. Or find a new industry that needs manual labor.
What you're actually frustrated by is having too many people in the hole.
This is all an analogy.
100% true!
YMMV but for me it’s the opposite
Many such cases.
> Should tech workers supercharged by AI be able to take more time off? Meta's chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, said he doesn't think so. [1]
> A Meta employee asked Bosworth if AI productivity gains could be channeled into more vacation time — specifically, the revival of "Meta Days," a since-canceled holiday program that allowed staff to take a few extra days off. [1]
> In response, Bosworth said that while working at Meta isn't easy, that time should be used to build more products for its users [1]
> "stop asking about Meta Days. It's very dumb." [1]
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-cto-andrew-bosworth-ai-...
%100 true, more and more stuff to do.
AI promised less workers, I guess.
I wonder if the US will actually be fine here. We're starting to restrict immigration (at all levels, legal, illegal, skilled, unskilled) and boomers are retiring en-masse. Will the productivity gains negate the loss of labor. Labor isn't quite fungible but we might find some equilibrium between these 2 functions.
AI promised less workERS, not less work!
The human workers remaining will be worked to the bone, now competing with, or at least shaded and stalked to some extent, by relentless obliging machines. Or be dispensed with.
The only consistent feature that has allowed people to work less and see more of the benefit of productivity is organized labor, and it's not even close.
The ways to use ai are still evolving
you’re able to find work in this market?
ai did not promise less, work it promised less workers
It was always a means to end. You do "work" to drive impact. You didn't think your job was to write code, did you? Your job is to be a cog in a machine that crushes competition. Your job is not about you or your feelings. You can do your "job" now faster? Great, figure out a way to do it with more impact. If you can't do that, find another job. If you can do that at your current job, great, figure out a way to do that. If you don't like this setup, you can do other jobs. Play the game or get destroyed. Read a history book or look at the guy bringing your your Chinese crap from Amazon for alternatives.
This is a general trend with technology, and is why the industrial revolution never gave us an age of leisure. First people are worried it's gonna take all the jobs, then they realize no it's actually going to create a ton more jobs and more work by expanding the overall economy and creating dozens of new niches for new stuff that didn't exist before. Some old professions vanish but new ones either get created or get expanded a lot.
AI needs humans to fill in the gaps at what it's not good at: acquiring and managing large volumes of new information/context. This requires humans to learn faster than ever before, since their projects grow much more rapidly, and to spend far more time managing and switching context, which people generally find unpleasant.
I stopped reading when I got to “The twist is the role”.
I read enough clanker writing at work.
Which is too bad because I really empathize with having to juggle multiple sessions while knowing that I do my best work when I focus and now I have to do the opposite of focus.
This is a bit of a strawman, as almost all AI-related opinion pieces are on here lately.
"The pitch was that AI would give us our time back. Write less boilerplate, delegate the boring parts, go home earlier."
Who pitched this? Where was this argued?
And for what it's worth, our entire industry was pitched as a way for businesses to do more with less. Our raison d'être is that we would automate and enhance parts of business so you no longer need the rooms of analysts, the constant inventory manpower churn, rooms of typists, mailrooms, and on and on and on.
It's a bit rich for us to clutch pearls now. We exist as an industry to put other people out of work, and many of us have made a lot of money doing just that. There is zero surprise that businesses would like to put us out of work if they could.
And even among our industry, many of us spent much of our time trying to reduce the need for other programmers. Doesn't the website builder maker put web developers out of business? Framework vendors are replacing lots of internal code that could keep big teams employed for decades! Microsoft and other big firms are constantly trying to figure out what the many employers of software dev teams are doing...so they can replace them. I mean, we all do that, trying to automate and simplify the need for other teams to exist.
The "pitch" of AI is that it's a new tool that your competitors are going to be using, so you had better get onboard now too, in a classic adapt or die choice. And...this is largely true! You can't argue it away. You can mythologize a never existed history where software used to be perfect in the pre-AI era. You can't moralize about slop or pretend it's all a mirage. It's all just foolish rhetoric that groups all cluck and upvote to make each other feel good, while the rest of the world moves on.
To be clear to the author and everyone else: AI never promised less work, or a better society. Those promises were made by humans with a storied history of misdirection, misinformation, and outright lies, and those same humans have intentionally refused or failed to deliver on those promises because, well, why would they? You bought into their scheme, they got their politicians in their pockets, they have outsized influence in society, and they have blank checks to basically do as they please written by some of the worst humans society has minted.
The doom was never about the tools, it was always about the shitty humans shoving it down our throats to their own benefit.
I've been working less, using AI, to be honest.
I'm doing a lot of investigations using AI. I know what to look into, I'm just using AI to do the menial tasks (pull logs from there, see if X is happening, edit that grafana dashboard, etc etc).
And frankly I see that mostly AI-doomers voices have been heard. I have a colleague from finance dept that's ecstatic about having a claude plugin for excel. She still reviews the sheets she compiles but she's so happy to have an incredible tool to take care of the menial work (that is, a conversational interface rather than having to go click left and right to build the kind of visualization she wants etc etc).
So... It's not as bad as some people say it is.
wow
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Better AI -> Labor is more expendable -> Employers demand more from workers
The Great Irony