In some cases, workers are also being asked to automate the parts of their jobs they enjoy most, Hinds said on the podcast, pointing to customer-service employees who enjoy building relationships but are increasingly expected to supervise AI agents instead.

"That's what gives you joy and meaning at work," she said. "That is very dangerous."

What's a 20% productivity gain if I constantly feel deflated by work that used to energize me? That's going to give back the productivity gain and more, while also decreasing my quality of life.

Like others said, the frustration is when it gets something so wrong you just think "wow, how'd you mess that up?" but when it gets it right its kind of nice. I also dont like that I basically tell Claude what to do, and then either go to busy work or waste time on the internet.

If you spend countless hours at work, and you partially define yourself by your work, and you realise you are easily replaceable then I cannot imagine this comes without mass social malaise that manifests itself elsewhere.

When you know you're essentially babysitting the workhorse to ensure it doesn't go off the rails, I can't see job satisfaction, and the social consequences of such, increasing.

In the last century I enjoyed crafting my own 'libraries' of functions that I could then use on the projects I worked on. As time went on, there was less and less of a point doing that as the odds rose near to 100% that there was 'a library for that' thing I was working on, so I was encouraged/forced to download it and use it.

It solved problems and was quicker than writing bespoke code (and libraries were hardly a new idea), so the logic was hard to deny, but I enjoyed my job less over time. Now I've risen up the ranks and now code mostly for fun (yes, I use AI to write functions for me) I look at what it must be like to enter the industry and think it all looks very different to how it did when I started.

You could argue that AI has done this much faster than it did in my early career, so people have less of the 'boiling frog' experience I had, and more of a 'sudden shock' to the system.

It's sad, but I've been doing this to other industries all my career, so I can hardly complain.

If I was valued at 1 trillion dollars, and I was in the hole enough to sink a couple small countries' GDP, maybe I would slowly start to optimize to maximize token usage.

I want to sell tokens, how do I sell more tokens? Not by doing the same work in less tokens, that's for sure.

This is like if you pay me by the hour and then excitedly tell me that you keep paying 10k a month and it's great. I will most certainly not work faster, in this hypothetical, if you tell me you love spending money because it gives you a dopamine rush. I would probably spend a couple more hours REALLY thinking about the task, maybe writing some docs nobody will read, maybe considering multiple options, doing benchmarks, doing research, and then later maybe ill do the actual task as well.

Im not saying these AI companies are scamming us, but the incentives are there and extremely clear. The only thing currently holding it back is that there is some vague kind of competition.

Generally, I spend anywhere between 15 mins and an hour setting things up (depending on how well the project is set up for AI work), and then set the agent going, coming back in a half-hour to an hour to check its progress. Generally, the tooling keeps it honest (for golang, forbidigo is AWESOME). 80% of the questions the agent asks me require a lot of thought. 20% of what it does needs correction.

The other thing to remember with LLMs is that they are NOT human, and won't react in a human way. So you'll see strikes of "brilliance" followed by the absolutely bizarre. But good guardrails keep that to a minimum.

as a boss (or researcher) i'm going to measure productivity based on amount of output per hour that i'm paying you; as a workers, i'm going to measure productivity based on amount of output relative to the amount of effort i'm putting in.

so what may be happening is that bosses see that output is at 80% (productivity down!) but workers see that they can give that 80% output with 40% effort (productivity up!).

I've used it plenty, more recently than ever before, but I'm coming more and more to the conclusion I don't want anything to do with it.

Botsitting is low-skilled. Low-mental reward work will become low-financial reward work before long.

I was initially worried that I had to keep up, learn the new tools or get left behind. But I'm beginning to see it as an entirely different domain of work, and one I'm fine not doing.

I think I'm best off preserving my skills and autonomy, rather than fighting with an agent and fretting about tokens for the foreseeable. I've no desire to be a botsitter.

Worst case scenario, this really is the future, and I become unemployable in tech: I've done other sorts of work in the past, things I'm happy returning to if this is the future.

I've a hunch that's still going to be a while off. I hope so anyway.

the wild thing is, i liked my job 3 years ago. i liked the satisfaction of creating for sales. they could be annoying, but it was minor normal (human) corporate squabbles. now, when they're explicitly bragging about getting rid of designers and treating us as sub-human, it's creating resentment and misery. personally job satisfaction sharply decreased in the last 6 months let alone the last 3 years - i'd say from 80% happy to 20%.

personally, i think suicides are probably going to be on the rise in a big way specifically due to this; and that's just the people who can hang onto a job right now; cannot tell you how many designers and animators are out of jobs and desperate.

HN posts seem to go from very supportive to very critical of AI with very few articles striking a balance.

Was there a time or technology phase in the past (I'm thinking perhaps when everyone was going over to GraphQL just because of the hype) that you recall being similar to this? If so, how did you maintain curiosity without feeling yourself go through the extremes of "This is the worst / best thing to ever happen"?

So for my work, it's made me much better at my job. Much faster and more accurate.

(There's a reason why I call it the MBA's stone. It transmutes all knowledge work into a problem of management.)

But now it's happening at the company level: "We're going to add a chatbot to increase productivity! Now MCP tools! Then agentic workflows! We’ll add skills, and now productivity will go up! Maybe loops will do it?"

The best I can say is that genAI is a self reported a 20% efficiency boost, and for a very (very) small group of people, it’s maybe a 2-3x boost. (And if you are at a frontier lab, you go fly into the big bucket of exceptions)

At this point, for most use cases, AI productivity is either the equivalent of giving people 3D printers, and seeing little benefit, or signing up for an outsourcing service, just without the development of human capital anywhere.

Welcome to the factory!

I’ve been told before.

I have barely technical people I knew from college pushing the latest AI certification (I can't imagine this staying relevant for longer than 6 months) and one being hired as a frontier AI engineer.

It reminds me of 2000 all over again where knowing html got you a six-figure job.

This is all normal. It’s also well worth the time spent learning