What's Anthropic's optimization target??? Getting you the right answer as fast as possible! The variability in agent output is working against that goal, not serving it. If they could make it right 100% of the time, they would — and the "slot machine" nonsense disappears entirely. On capped plans, both you and Anthropic are incentivized to minimize interactions, not maximize them. That's the opposite of a casino. It's ... alignment (of a sort)
An unreliable tool that the manufacturer is actively trying to make more reliable is not a slot machine. It's a tool that isn't finished yet.
I've been building a space simulator for longer than some of the people diagnosing me have been programming. I built things obsessively before LLMs. I'll build things obsessively after.
The pathologizing of "person who likes making things chooses making things over Netflix" requires you to treat passive consumption as the healthy baseline, which is obviously a claim nobody in this conversation is bothering to defend.
To the bluesky poster's point: Pulling out a laptop at a party feels awkward for most; pulling out your phone to respond to claude barely registers. That’s what makes it dangerous: It's so easy to feel some sense of progress now. Even when you’re tired and burned out, you can still make progress by just sending off a quick message. The quality will, of course, slip over time; but far less than it did previously.
Add in a weak labor market and people feel pressure to stay working all the time. Partly because everyone else is (and nobody wants to be at the bottom of the stack ranking), and partly because it’s easier than ever to avoid hitting a wall by just "one more message". Steve Yegge's point about AI vampires rings true to me: A lot of coworkers I’ve talked to feel burned out after just a few months of going hard with AI tools. Those same people are the ones working nights and weekends because "I can just have a back-and-forth with Claude while I'm watching a show now".
The likely result is the usual pattern for increases in labor productivity. People who can’t keep up get pushed out, people who can keep up stay stuck grinding, and companies get to claim the increase in productivity while reducing expenses. Steve's suggestion for shorter workdays sound nice in theory, but I would bet significant amounts of money the 40-hour work week remains the standard for a long time to come.
It's more like being hooked on a slot machine which pays out 95% of the time because you know how to trick it.
(I saw "no actual evidence pointing to these improvements" with a footnote and didn't even need to click that footnote to know it was the METR thing. I wish AI holdouts would find a few more studies.)
Steve Yegge of all people published something the other day that has similar conclusions to this piece - that the productivity boost for coding agents can lead to burnout, especially if companies use it to drive their employees to work in unsustainable ways: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/the-ai-vampire-eda6e4f07163
If you are unfamiliar with the various ways that naive code would fail in production, you could be fooled into thinking generated code is all you need.
If you try to hold the hand of the coding agents to bring code to a point where it is production ready, be prepared for a frustrating cycle of models responding with ‘Fixed it!’ while only having introduced further issues.
And to another point: work life balance is a huge challenge. Burnout happens in all departments, not just engineering. Managers can get burnout just as easily. If you manage AI agents, you'll just get burnout from that too.
My paraphrase of their caveats:
- experts on their own open source proj are not representative of most software dev
- measuring time undervalues trading time for effort
- tools are noticeably better than they were a year ago when the study was conducted
- it really does take months of use to get the hang of it (or did then, less so now)
Before you respond to these points, please look at the full study’s treatment of the caveats! It’s fantastic, and it’s clear almost no one citing the study actually read it.
[0]: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
But that's for personal pleasure. This post is receeding from the concerns about "token anxiety," about the addiction to tokens. This post is about work culture & late capitalism anxiety, about possible pressures & systems society might impose.
I reflect a lot on AI doesn't reduce the work, it intensifies it. https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies... The spirit of this really nails something core to me. We coders especially get help doing so much of menial now. Which means we spend a lot more time making intense analysis and critiques, are much more doing the hard thought work of 'is what we have here as good as it can be'. Finding new references or patterns to feed back into the AI to steer already working implementations towards better outcomes.
And my heart tells me that corporations & work life as we know it are almost universally just really awful about supporting reflective contemplative work like this. Work wants output. It doesn't want you sit in a hammock and think about it. But increasingly I tell you the key to good successful software is Hammock Driven Development. It's time to use our brains more, in quiet reflection. https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...
996 sounds like garbage on its own, as a system of toil. But I also very much respect an idea of continuous work, one that also intersperses rest throughout the day. Doing some chores or going to the supermarket or playing with the kid can be an incredibly good way to let your preconscious sift through the big gnarly problems about. The response to the intensity of what we have, to me, speaks of a need to spread out the work, to de-concentrate it, to build in more than hammock time. I was on the fence about whether the traditional workday deserved to survive before AI hit, and my feels about it being a gross mismatch have massively intensified since.
As I started my post with, I personally have a much more positive experience, with what yes feels like a token addiction. But it doesn't feel like an anxiety. It feels like the greatest most exciting adventure, far beyond what I had hoped for in life ever. This is wildly fun, going far far further out than I had ever hoped to get to see. I'm not "anxiously" pulling the lever arm on the token machine, I'm just thrilled to get to do it. To have time to reflect and decide, I have 3-8 things going at once (and probably double they back burnered but open, on Niri rows!) to let myself make slower decisions, to analyze, while keeping the things that can safely move forwards moving forwards.
That also seems like something worker exploitative late capitalism is mostly hot garbage at too! Companies really try to reduce in flight activities. Sprint planning is about crafting deliberate work. But our freedom and agency here far outstrips these dusty old practices. It is anxiety inducing to be so powerful so capable & to have a bureaucracy that constraints and confines, that wants only narrow windows of our use.
Also, shame on Tim Kellogg for not God damned linking the actual post he was citing. Garbagefire move. https://writing.nikunjk.com/p/token-anxiety https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47021136