by hansonkd
16 subcomments
- I've been saying this for the past 2 years. Even think about the stereotypical "996" work schedule that is all the rave in SF and AI founder communities.
It just takes thinking about it for 5 seconds to see the contradiction. If AI was so good at reducing work, why is it every company engaging with AI has their workload increase.
20 years ago SV was stereotyped for "lazy" or fun loving engineers who barely worked but cashed huge pay checks. Now I would say the stereotype is overworked engineers who on the midlevel are making less than 20 back.
I see it across other disciplines too. Everyone I know from sales, to lawyers, etc if they engage with AI its like they get stuck in a loop where the original task is easier but now it revealed 10 more smaller tasks that fill up their time even more so than before AI.
Thats not to say productivity gains with AI aren't found. It just seems like the gains get people into a flywheel of increasing work.
by btbuildem
7 subcomments
- I think the article nails it, on multiple counts. From personal experience, the cognitive overload is sneaky, but real. You do end up taking on more than you can handle, just because your mob of agents can do the minutia of the tasks, doesn't free you from comprehending, evaluating and managing the work. It's intense.
by bryanlarsen
1 subcomments
- I've started calling it "revenge of the QA/Support engineers", personally.
Our QA & Support engineers have now started creating MR's to fix customer issues, satisfy customer requests and fix bugs.
They're AI sloppy and a bunch of work to fix up, but they're a way better description of the problem than the tickets they used to send.
So now instead of me creating a whole bunch of work for QA/Support engineers when I ship sub-optimal code to them, they're creating a bunch of work for me by shipping sub-optimal code to me.
by ishtanbul
2 subcomments
- This is jevons paradox at its purest. Who really thought companies were just going to let everyone go home earlier? Work is easier, now you will do even more. Congratulations.
- Exactly as happened with computer revolution... Expectations raised in line with productivity. In HN parlance, being a 10x engineer just becomes "being an engineer," and "100x engineer" is the new 10x engineer. And from what I can see in myself and others right now, being a 100x of anything, while exhilarating, is also mentally and physically taxing.
by neversupervised
1 subcomments
- HBR is analyzing this with an old world lens. It might very well be that the effects are as they say temporarily. But the reason this is happening is because AI is in fact replacing human labor and the puppeteers are trying to remain employed. The steady state outcome is human replacement, which means AI does in fact reduce human labor, even if the remaining humans in the loop are more overloaded. The equation is not workload per capita but how many humans it takes to accomplish a goal.
by autoconfig
2 subcomments
- "It never gets easier, you just go faster" - Greg LeMond
by alexpotato
2 subcomments
- My dad was a stockbroker in the 1970s and he had a great line:
“When computers first came out we were told:
‘Computers will be so productive and save you so much time you won’t know what to do with all of your free time!’
Unsurprisingly, that didn’t happen.”
Aka Jevon’s Paradox in practice
by bunderbunder
1 subcomments
- When you’re sailing, juat going as fast as possible won’t necessarily get you where you need to go.
Not just won’t get you there fastest. At all.
- The title alone maximizes the word-to-LLMism ratio
- I think there is another dynamic that this article hints at but does not call out explicitly: work becoming much more intense because AI is now doing most of the cognitively less intense -- maybe even relaxing -- "donkey work."
This means humans are now spending most of their time doing the much more intense problem-solving work, followed by the dopamine hit of seeing their work completed. The cognitive buffer of that lengthy, intermediate donkey work is gone.
I posted more about it in this comment yesterday on the thread about AI fatigue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46938038
People are now working at a much more intense cadence, which will inevitably lead to burnout unless work is managed to be more sustainable.
- This article is scratching the surface of the concept of desynchronization from the theory of social acceleration and the sociology of speed. Any technology that is supposed to create idle time, once it reaches mass adoptions has the opposite effect of speeding up everything else.
We have been on this track for a long time: cars were supposed to save time in transit, but people started living farther from city centres (c.f. Marchetti's constant). E-Mail and instant messaging were supposed to eliminate wait time from postal services, but we now send orders of magnitude more messages and social norms have shifted such that faster replies are expected.
"AI" backed productivity increases are only impressive relative to non-AI users. The idilliac dream of working one or two days a week with agents in the background "doing the rest" is delusional. Like all previous technologies once it reaches mass adoption everyone will be working at a faster pace, because our society is obsessed with speed.
by vagrantstreet
0 subcomment
- How about using LLM's to improve developer experience instead? I've had a lot of failures with "AI" even on small projects, even the best things I've tried like (agentic-project-management) I still had to just go back to traditional coding.
Not sure if everyone shares this sentiment but the reason I use AI as a crutch is due to poor documentation that's out there, even simple terminal commands don't show use examples for ls when you try to type man ls. I just end up putting up with the code output because it works ok enough for short term, this however doesn't seem like a sustainable plan long term either.
There is also this dread I feel because what I would do if AI went down permanently? The tools I tried like Zeal really didn't do it for me either for documentation, not sure who decided on the documentation format but this "Made by professionals, for professionals" isn't really cutting it anymore. Apologies in advance if I missed out on any tools but in my 4+ years of university nobody ever mentioned any quality tools either, and I'm sure this trend is happening everywhere.
by xXSLAYERXx
0 subcomment
- > On their own initiative workers did more because AI made “doing more” feel possible, accessible, and in many cases intrinsically rewarding.
Love this quote. For me, barely a few weeks in, I feel exactly this. To clarify - I feel this only when working on dusty old side projects. When I use it to build for the org its still a slog just faster.
- I've noticed first hand how the scope of responsibilities is broadened by integrating AI on workflows. Personally if feels like a positive feedback loop: I take more responsibilities; since they are outside my scope I have a harder time reviewing AI output; this increases fatigue and makes me more prone to just accepting more AI output; with the increase in reliance on AI output I get to a point where I'm managing things that are way outside my scope and I can't do it unless I rely on AI entirely. In my opinion this also increases Imposter Syndrome effects.
But I doubt companies and management will think for a second that this voluntary increase in "productivity" is any bad, and it will probably be encouraged
by __MatrixMan__
0 subcomment
- I'm not sure if intensifies is the word. AI just has awkward time dynamics that people are adapting to.
Sometimes you end up with tasks that are low intensity long duration. Like I need to supervise this AI over the course of three hours, but the task is simple enough that I can watch a movie while I do it. So people measuring my work time are like "wow he's working extra hours" but all I did during that time is press enter 50 times and write 3 sentences.
by plainspeech
1 subcomments
- AI speeds things up at the beginning. It helps you get unstuck, find answers quickly without jumping through different solutions from internet, write boilerplate, explore ideas faster. But over time I reach for it faster than I probably should. Instead of digging into basic code, I directly jump to AI. I’ve been using it for even basic code searches. AI just makes it easier to outsource thinking. And your understanding of the codebase can get thinner over time.
- Every other advancement in office productivity and software has intensified work. AI will too. It will also further commodify it.
- It's totally expected because the bar goes way up. There used to be a time when hosting a dynamic website with borderline default HTML components was difficult enough that companies spent hundreds of thousands of dollars. These days, a single person's side project is infinitely more complex.
- The only sustainable thing to do is to reduce peoples work hours, but keep paying them to the same over the week.
If before AI we were talking about 6 hours days as an aim, we should be talking about a 4 hour work day, without any reduction in pay.
Otherwise everyone is going to burn out.
by tsunamifury
1 subcomments
- In the Ford matrix of smart to dumb and hardworking to lazy AI will enable the dumb and hard working to 100x their damage to a company over night.
by micromacrofoot
0 subcomment
- Same with most productivity gains in tooling historically, I think one way we should consider reckoning with this is through workers rights.
The industrial revolution lead to gains that allowed for weekends and the elimination of child labor, but they didn't come for free, they had to be fought for.
If we don't fight for it, what are we gaining? more intense work in exchange for what?
- Delete the llmism after the dash and the title is correct.
- The cognitive overload is more so people not understanding the slop they are generating. Slop piles on top of slop until a situation arrives where you actually need to understand everything, and you don’t because you didn’t do the work yourself.
by ChrisArchitect
0 subcomment
- Related:
AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46939593
by energy123
2 subcomments
- > In an eight-month study
Things have improved significantly since then. Copying and pasting code from o1/o3 versus letting codex 5.3 xhigh assemble its own context and do it for you.
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