You never needed 1000s of engineers to build software anyway, Winamp & VLC were build by less than four people. You only needed 1000s of people because the executive vision is always to add more useless junk into each product. And now with AI that might be even harder to avoid. This would mean there would be 1000s of do-everything websites in the future in the best case, or billions of doing one-thing terribly apps in the worst case.

percentage of good, well planned, consistent and coherent software is going to approach zero in both cases.

Previously, I'd have an idea, sit on it for a while. In most cases, conclude it's not a good idea worth investing in. If I decided to invest, I'd think of a proper strategy to approach it.

With agentic development, I have an idea, waste a few hours chasing it, then switch to other work, often abandoning the thing entirely.

I still need to figure out how to deal with that, for now I just time box these sessions.

But I feel I'm trading thinking time for execution time, and understanding time for testing time. I'm not yet convinced I like those tradeoffs.

Edit: Just a clarification: I currently work in two modes, depending on the project. In some, I use agentic development. In most, I still do it "old school". That's what makes the side effects I'm noticing so surprising. Agentic development pulls me down rabbit holes and makes me loose the plot and focus. Traditional development doesn't, its side effects apparently keep me focused and in control.

Those things don't excite you any more. Plus, the fact that you no longer exercise your brain at work any more. Plus, the constant feeling of FOMO.

It deflates you, faster.

This is actually a really good point that I have kind of noticed when using AI for side project, so being on my own time. The allure of thinking "Oh I wonder how it will perform with this feature request if I give it this amount of info".

Can't say I would put off sleep for it but I get the sentiment for sure.

When washing machines were introduced, the number of hours of doing the chore of laundry did not necessarily decrease until 40 years after the introduction.

When project management software was introduced, it made the task of managing project tasks easier. One could create an order of magnitude or more of detailed plans in the same amount of time - poorly used this decreased the odds of project success, by eating up everyone's time. And the software itself has not moved the needle in terms of project success factors of successfully completing within budget, time, and resources planned.

Also this post should link to the original source as well.

As per the submission guidelines [1]:

”Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.”

[0] https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

   1. New productivity enhancer comes out.
   2. Everyone thinks, "This is it! Work will get shorter|easier as a result of this!"
   3. Instead the work gets faster|more|higher quality and the (time) volume stays roughly the same.

When work reduction does happen, it generally happens at a person-quantum level: people hang on to their role until it goes away entirely, and they (hopefully) find something else to do. Rarely is it the case that someone legitimately reduces to part time incrementally as productivity increases.

AI is similar: no doubt jobs will go away as a result, but much less often will AI result in jobs that are easy/part time. For anyone still in the "work" game, even with AI there's still 5x8 hours of work to do.

In the book The researcher explains that when washing machines were invented the women faced a whole new expectation of clean clothes all the time because washing clothes was much less of a labor. And statistics pointed out that women actually were washing clothes more often than doing more work after the washing machine was invented then before.

This happens with any technology. AI is no different.

Long story short, it was ugly and didn't really work as I wanted. So I'm learning Hugo myself now... The whole experience was kind of frustrating tbh.

When I finally settled in en did some hours of manual work I felt much better because of it. I did benefit from my planning with Claude though...

Tell me about what’s the LLM impact on your work, on account your work is not wiring about AI.

Or if one wish for a more explicit noise filter: Don’t tell me what AI can do. Show me what you shipped with it that isn’t about AI.

I prompt and sit there. Scrolling makes it worse. It's a good mental practice to just stay calm and watch the AI work.

* Made Termux accessible enough for me to use.

* Made an MUD client for Emacs.

Gotten Emacs and Emacspeak working on Termux.

Gotten XFCE to run with Orca and AT-SPI communicating to make the desktop environment accessible.

None of this would have happened without AI. Of course, it's only useful for a few people that are blind, use Android, and love Linux and Emacs and such. But it's improved my life a ton. I can do actual work on my phone. I've got Org-mode, calendar, Org-journal, desktop chromium, ETC. all on my phone. And if AI dies tomorrow, I'll still have it. The code is all there for me to learn from, tweak, and update.

I just use one agent, Codex. I don't do the agent swarms yet.

That changes if you get it to write code for you. I tried vibe-coding an entire project once, and while I ended up with a pretty result that got some traction on Reddit, I didn't get any sense of accomplishment at all. It's kinda like doomscrolling in a way, it's hard to stop but it leaves you feeling empty.

The worst part is that it’s so convincing: not only does everyone who can’t make it work feel gaslit about it, but some people even pretend that it works for them so they don’t feel like they’re missing out.

I remember the last time this happened and people were convinced (for like 2 years) that a gif of an ape could somehow be owned and was worth millions of dollars.

The workflow and responsibilities are very different. It can be a painful transition.

There has always been a strong undercurrent of developers feeling superior to managers and PMs and now those develoeprs are being forced to confront the reality of a manager or PM's experience.

Work is changing, and the change is only going to accelerate.

Yeah, good luck with that.

Corporations have tried to reduce employee burnout exactly never times.

That’s something that starts at the top. The execs tend to be “type A++” personalities, who run close to burnout, and don’t really have much empathy for employees in the same condition.

But they also don’t believe that employees should have the same level of reward, for their stress.

For myself, I know that I am not “getting maximum result” from using LLMs, but I feel as if they have been a real force multiplier, in my work, and don’t feel burnt out, at all.

In reality, it's a partner who helps with the dishes by bringing home 3 neighbours worth of dirty dishes. Then says, "You're doing a great job with how fast you're scrubbing those dishes."

Previous discussion of the original article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945755

alpha sigma grindset

It’s insane how productive I am.

I used to have “breaks” looking for specific keywords or values to enter while crafting a yaml.

Now the AI makes me skip all of that, essentially.

What I personally find exhausting is Simon¹ constantly discovering the obvious. Time after time after time it’s just “insights” every person who smoked one blunt in college has arrived at.

Stop for a minute! You don’t have to keep churning out multiple blog posts a day, every day. Just stop and reflect. Sit back in your chair and let your mind rest. When a thought comes to you, let it go. Keep doing that until you regain your focus and learn to distinguish what matters from what is shiny.

Yes, of course, you’re doing too much and draining yourself. Of course your “productivity” doesn’t result in extra time but is just filled with more of the same, that’s been true for longer than you’ve been alive. It’s a variation of Parkinson’s law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

¹ And others, but Simon is particularly prevalent on HN, so I bump into these more often.

it's good that people so quickly see it as impulsive and addicting, as opposed to the slow creep of doomscrolling and algorithm feeds

Literal work junkies.

And what’s the point? If you’re working on your own project then “just one more feature, bro” isn’t going to make next Minecraft/Photopea/Stardew Valley/name your one man wonder. If you’re working for someone, then you’re a double fool, because you’re doing work of two people for the pay of one.

Worth every penny.

People keep on making the same naive assumption that the total amount of work is a constant when you mess with the cost of that work. The reality is that if you make something cheaper, people will want more of it. And it adds up to way more than what was asked before.

That's why I'm not worried about losing my job. The whole notion is based on a closed world assumption, which is always a bad assumption.

If you look at the history of computers and software engineering including compilers, ci/cd, frameworks/modules/etc. functional and OO programming paradigms, type inference, etc. There's something new every few years. Every time we make something easier and cheaper, demand goes up and the amount of programmers increases.

And every time you have people being afraid to lose their jobs. Sometimes jobs indeed disappear because that particular job ceases to exist because technique X got replaced with technique Y. But mostly people just keep their jobs and learn the new thing on the job. Or they change jobs and skill up as they go. People generally only lose their jobs when companies fail or start shrinking. It's more tied to economical cycles than to technology. And some companies just fail to adapt. AI is going to be similar. Lots of companies are flirting with it but aren't taking it seriously yet. Adoption cycles are always longer than people seem to think.

AI prompting is just a form of higher level programming and being able to program is a non optional skill to be able to prompt effectively. I'd use the word meta programming but of course that's one of those improvements we already had.