The opening premise baffles me. What kind of illusion must one be under to believe that employers would ever pay you the same amount of money to do less work?
Realistically there were only ever two possible outcomes: you do more work for the same amount of money, or you’re one of the ones who were laid off and your work was transferred to the former.
The only way it will result in less work and the same or better quality of life is if you’re self-employed or are employed by a compassionate human. Sadly that does not apply to the majority of people.
> The opening premise baffles me. What kind of illusion must one be under to believe that employers would ever pay you the same amount of money to do less work?
It seems like a pretty common misunderstanding in rank-and-file AI-boosterism. I'm guessing that reflects their initial experience, before their employer adjusts their expectations, extrapolated out to infinity. Your correct understanding makes AI sound like a bad deal for workers (and it is), so my theory AI-enthusiastic boosters have to engage in a degree of reality distortion to keep up their enthusiasm.
You are missing a critical third - people organize and via unions or the polls push back and require less work. There is no reason we aren’t working seven days a week beyond people fighting not to.
I'm very pro-union but I feel like at this point attempting to organize will just speed up the process of replacing as many people as possible with machines, not slow it down. It's too little, too late.
I don't understand what kind of society we're building right now. Anthropic and other AI labs at $20T valuations, the 1% monopolizing all the wealth and the rest of us out of a job and fighting for the scraps?
There seems to be some sort of magical thinking within the AI crowd at the moment, that it'll all work itself out in the end.
Large companies have been spending millions in propaganda and attacks to ensure that people in the US think that unions are pure communism. By the time we get enough people to make a difference there may be T100's stepping on our bones at this point.
Somebody should do a economic analysis of how technology affects unions. I bet the availability of automation has a lot more to do with the downfall of the unions than the political changes that are commonly described to that phenomenon. Similarly, I bet the availability of AI will have a devastating effect on any white collar unions.
I'm pro unions and come from a social county. I'm self employed though, if I start relaxing, my "competitors" outrun me instantly. Bye bye assignments. This seems like primary school level reasoning to me, I also don't understand the premise of the article.
What stops me from working more than others is being smarter than my competitors right now. Not being smarter in any objective, fixed way. To keep it that way I must constantly evolved, learn.
Yes, micromanaging AIs is more intense for me than coding, and feels more tiring, I hope that (or I) will change, somehow.
I started asking for specific example/answers each time a conversation stopped before of the end of the task. I got the sense that frequent checkpointing is baked into Opus 5.5. I then added some language that amounts to “carry this through to completion only stopping if you’re truly blocked” and it really helped lengthen the loop
Apparently, minute hands were added to clocks so factory owners could extract more work from their employees.
Medieval people used to own more property (though not technologically equivalent of course) and "owned" more of their time than the average person today.
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As for the title of this post, I can testify to that: As a solo coder, AI has actually increased the amount of work I do - but in a good way!
Even on non vibe-coded stuff, AI reviews keep helping me finding bugs and inconsistencies to fix that would have taken ages to even notice on my own
but more than that, whenever I have the faintest idea about anything, I can immediately put it to practice and explore it further or move on to other ideas.
Even when I'm outdoors away from my computer doing some normal life stuff in meatspace, I often think of stuff and pull out my phone and open the ChatGPT app to remote into my computer's Codex.
Unions do not exist in a vacuum. They have to operate in the same fundamental power structures as everyone else.
If union A is like "work less let AI take the slack" and union B is like "work the same, use AI to achieve more, let AI help us win" I'm joining union B every time.
Unions also require the right structural conditions.
For example waste management generally has very strong unions in the developed world because 1) capital intensity 2) operations immediately seize on labour withdrawal 3) consequences of strikes are in a golden zone of painful but not existential so are tolerated 4) extract a relatively small proportion of local gov funds, so don’t create that much powerful opposition 5) labour force is locally concentrated and highly socialised.
Those pillars of power don’t rely much on any particular legal or political system.
I am surprised people don't look at this like hiring a plumber. When you hire a company to do something for you if they are doing less work and/or the work is easy enough you can do it yourself, you would not want to pay someone a lot to do the work.
We have our own small boutique software type of business, so we aren't dealing with "employers", but all of us have never worked more, and for less (per hour) pay. Customers simply have higher expectations now, and we have to compete globally with basically an entire planet willing to vibe-code things, along with internal pressure at clients of "we can just do this ourselves".
So that means shipping higher quality, faster, with more features, and for a lower end price.
Yeah, I also don't get why people expect to work 2 hrs instead of 8 and receive same salary.
Once you go from horse to tractor the fields increase but work hours doesn't decrease. And if you still use a horse, you are outperformed by the tractor guys who will sell stuff at less the price that you can sustain.
Because that's what they observe the executive management performing for multiple employers simultaneously and the definitional difference between salary and hourly wage.
A rational employer is interested in how much value they can get, not how hard you work. In most cases, in the short term, an increase in efficiency means they can get more value from you working the same amount of the same pay.
The problem is how 'hard work' is defined. Does staying after hours count? Not automatically, but managers everywhere use it as a proxy ( whether it is dumb position or not is an argument in itself ). Does carefully considering your options count? Does being anal when it comes to minute detail count? All of these are small dimensions of hard work, but we throw those vague terms willy nilly, because we hope the audience will accept our 'used key term values' within our message to them.
Keep In mind that developers in Amazon this year was forced to burn as much tokens as possible because their "rational" employer was assuming that productivity == tokens burned. I was in similiar situations on my last project.
This abstract value you mention is the same dictionary that managers use and I believe they often confuse themselves with that.
An increase in efficiency in and of itself, maybe, but there is no such thing. The increase in efficiency has largely come from deskilling the job. Deskilling the job makes the employees time less valuable, because they can be substituted for another more easily.
[edit: it's important to mention that this is compatible with programmer ego trips. I consider myself a reasonably good programmer and I've been doing it for a long time, but AI has made me far more eligible for jobs in languages that I have never used on platforms that I have never worked with.]
But another factor is that just because you can do work faster doesn't mean there's more work to do, so if you were hitting all your deadlines before with two employees, now you can fire one. Which one that will be is the result of a reverse wage auction.
> Deskilling the job makes the employees time less valuable, because they can be substituted for another more easily.
That's not that self evident yet. If AI is a multiplier it might be the other way around i.e. can a $300k engineer + unlimited tokens generate more a $200k in extra value compared to a $100k engineer? That should be much easier to achieve with AI than without it? The more you spend on tokens the more it makes sense to hire the most highly skilled people you can find since their salaries are no longer that significant.
I don't think the dynamics are similar to what they are e.g. during the industrial revolution since AI is more than capable of clicking the submit button on its own.
The issue is that wages are based on supply and demand and rarely directly related to how much value you generate.
Yeah, everybody wants freedom and flexibility from self-employment, but that's generally speaking not a realistic attainable goal. The most defensible small businesses are ones that are sweaty i.e. require a lot hard work and hours others just wont justify doing, and that's an extremely important facet because without employees its much easier for a business to catastrophically collapse. Pretty much by definition anything that requires low effort is easy to clone and thus become saturated.
Oh but AI has wiped out some of the most tedious work I have to do. I can now easily work every waking minute, and some sleeping minutes, at a level approximately comparable to my prior 8h workload from 10 years ago.
The amount of mental energy saved, and downright stimulation gained from seeing rapid feedback in a tight loop is making my workday much easier. I have enough left to continue it longer.
I find it enjoyable to have the energy to think, and less cognitive overload by firing off a suggestion to be checked overnight.
You're right that this would be awful if mandatory.
but it often was socially mandatory!
At least when those times come, the work can go much further before I have to actually "check in" vs doing some well-trod analysis via automation I've set up. That's great!
I’m of two minds on this. Yes I get a lot more done. Yes I create a lot more bugs. Yes I have to spend a lot more energy understanding some things the AI does vs having written it myself.
It’s a mixed bag. I would say the worst part is that the increased level of output AND the increased level of tech debt is becoming accepted as the norm.
What does compassion have to do with it? If the industry requires more output or your business fails what options do you have?
Also, as someone who has been self employed I can tell you that you're working 2x-3x as much as someone who is employed and you have to pay more in taxes.
At best all we can do is make knowledge work cheaper right now. But knowledge work was never the bottleneck behind energy prices, food production, transportation, cargo, etc.
It kind of was though? It was knowledge work that brought us fertilizers, tractors, trucks and large ships, which in turn made food as abundant as it is today.
Otherwise most of us would still toil on the fields just to harvest a tiny bit more food than our immediate family needs.
> It was knowledge work that brought us fertilizers, tractors, trucks and large ships, which
Yes but the number of people who actually worked on the R&D and the amount of time they spent on it is absolutely insignificant on the grand scale of things.
It's not that simple. In a time of massive flux and shake up you have to be ready to jump to different kinds of roles in different kinds of organizations. Maybe you've been an enterprise and need to jump to a startup or the reverse... or maybe you've been in an internal only role and need to move into a customer facing role or any number of other possibilities. Admittedly one way of interpreting the need for evolving is that it could be exhausting so in that sense the author has a point but it's not as black and white as you imply. At any moment in time there are growth areas in the economy and growth teams within companies and there are atrophying or declining areas of the economy or teams within companies. These macrodynamics are just as important as who you happen to work for and what the tools du jour mean for your work. But they require you to be intentionalable about making changes
>you have to be ready to jump to different kinds of roles in different kinds of organizations.
How did that work out in 1933?
There are limits to how much an economy can shake up before structural problems appear that means when the music stops there is no chair anywhere for you to sit in.
>At any moment in time there are growth areas in the economy
For bread line server?
Worse with the modern world you're not just competing with your neighbor, you're competing with the entire world and if the other parts of the world have lower costs you can quickly find yourself in a trap.
> The opening premise baffles me. What kind of illusion must one be under to believe that employers would ever pay you the same amount of money to do less work?
I guess the idea that AI will do all the work and either take care of us or kill us all. Which will probably happen, but the transition takes years and in the meantime we work much harder. People were expecting a fast takeoff.
For decades tech companies have promised that devices save time....but to do what? The pitch was that they would save time for us to do more 'creative stuff'...but I think that pitch and idea is fundamentally flawed. From doing creative stuff for a couple decades, I can make a few observations:
(1) More tech doesn't save time if it's developed in the direction/dimension of more information flow. Because it seems that the best environment for creativity is a somewhat restricted environment of information. And if one needs to engage with information to take advantage of this new tech, it actually impedes creativity.
(2) A lot of the grunt work that we seem to be automating also encourages creativity. From what I've observed from many artists and programmers (I hang out with both), it seems that creativity strikes best when it's not forced, and the "downtime" doing grunt work actually accelerates it.
So I think that AI breaks these two principles (minimal information and the removal of the crucial grunt work), and actually makes us work more for less.
The only gains seem to be those short-term kinds (a program can be made faster, rewards can be reaped by senior people who have thought about stuff for a while), rather than encouraging a healthy environment of creativity....
The key is the information environment and its reshaping, as you noted.
Every technology, even technologies that are, from the limited and naive perspective of the user, "free" (LLms can do what I used to do a lot faster than I can, and I don't need to maintain them right?) is not actually free. All technologies bring about their own demands and need for maintenance. Often they don't actually eliminate labor, they just shift it to new areas.
Consider LLMs. Even at the user level they have created their own information ecosystem and new grunt work and overhead. Now you have to prompt, you need to organize and manage context, skills, memory. You need to keep up with model releases. You need to be more vigilant reviewing things, the list goes on.
At a higher level they create even more toil, we need to maintain vast electrical supports and data infrastructure, data needs to be amassed continually for training, the information environment needs to be filtered and sorted more than ever as it gets flooded with slop.
This is the grand irony of technology. It's actually pretty rare for it to just be a total labor saving device. More often its real benefit is rearrangement of the world's structure and resources to move labor to more optimal places for certain needs (for example water supply systems).
This rearrangement also often rearranged financial resources and power. The big problem with LLMs today is that this aspect of the rearrangement is one of great concentration, and it's concerning (employers having a lot more power to extract labor from employees is one example)
I think AI has also devalued a lot of work that previously might have been "mundane" but still felt like an accomplishment once you got it done. But now you can do that work to an ±80% quality level of the old, manual way, but in 1% of the time.
So the result is noticeably worse, but you basically must do it, because the efficiency gains are inescapable. This makes the work seem even more pointless, adding to the feeling that you're working more and accomplishing less.
I may not work less, but certainly different and better.
Just this morning I went for a long walk on the beach, barefoot in the water. Using nothing but voice interaction, I handled a couple of outstanding CRM tasks, sorted out some accounting issues and upgraded my search infrastructure (SearXNG) and most of all enjoyed my walk outside. I would not be able to do all this without AI and would be stuck behind my desk, daydreaming about going for that walk instead.
With the power of AI, soon all of us can be doing outstanding CRM tasks instead of wasting time enjoying nature. Imagine the time savings we could recover by removing all quiet contemplative moments!
I’m a bit puzzled by this kind of comment, which pops up every time someone mentions getting some work done while out in nature.
What it seems to miss is that we get to walk around while doing some work, not the other way around. The alternative would be being stuck at a desk or in a meeting room, not quietly enjoying nature on a day off.
The counterfactual is impossible to prove here, but I think it’s at least plausible that this poster, who I guess lives near the beach, could have enjoyed their morning coffee on the beach
Yea, it seems that the OP neither did better work, or actually enjoyed the walk (I mean, how do you enjoy walk if you don't allow your thoughts to wander?)..
For those of us stuck in an office building, at a desk, AI models have enabled handling multiple tasks as a same time as fast as we can think. I'm absolutely doing multiple times the work I was doing before and the time between tasks is basically zero. Same pay, though, and drastically increased productivity and sense of effort.
For sure, and a good part can already be automated. But certain things still require human intervention and always will.
Keep in mind these work related walks do not replace other outdoor activities.
I get the idea and I used to try and optimize my computer time this way - working in the park, working while walking, etc.
In the end it was just a hassle and a distraction. I’d rather have 5 solid hours of work and 5 hours of non-work, rather than 10 hours of an awkward hybrid.
What seems better to you, seems a bit nightmarish to me. If I'm going for a walk, the last thing I want to have on my mind is dealing with CRM software in any way.
Or you would be unemployed and nervous about how you were going to pay your bills, replaced by someone willing to do the same work for lower cost while chained to said desk.
Yes of course your employer is fine with you going walking barefoot on a beach instead of being in the office working, and it's happy to pay you the same money. Come on...
Also, you are telling me that you can get only with voice interaction an AI to write well engineered and maintainable code, something I've yet to see an AI be able to do, to me the result that they tend is at best the same of a junior developer, except that the junior developer learns, the AI continues to make the same mistakes (because it's context is limited, when it's full it's full).
:D As a person who can do both ( and keeps logs of various interesting mishaps in our little corner of the universe ), neither is easy to do well, both require skill and, well, current literacy rates don't exactly make me optimistic.
edit: It is actually kinda funny. One would think that we would embrace it the full spectrum now as we could have the best of both worlds ( logic and language side by side solving humanity's problems ).
AI also gives employees much more leverage than before, as they no longer need a large team to compete with BigCos at knowledge work. It's never been cheaper to start a software business.
The side effect of this is also that the value of software itself has never been lower, so starting a new software business isn't very attractive in today's market.
I wonder how much companies would pay people to NOT replicate their products. Like, if I'm just hacking around with my LLM, and am approaching a near 100% drop-in replacement for the entire Atlassian suite--how much would they pay me to NOT do that? Is that worth 1 livable wage to them?
I'm running a small software company together with a partner. We've moved from partly working with externals to 100% working with onpremise AI.
Both of us feel the AI fatigue from time to time.
My personal analysis is that the speed went up, with this the bandwith of different topics.
Other factors that weigh in are a not lowering learning curve inside the heavily iterating AI sector and the chattiness of the Agents. If not stopped they produce so much facts that it kills me. I started constantly working on this to stop the waterfall of facts and get ontop of it.
AI is increasing productivity. Companies are positioned to leverage this, employees are not, as they'll still work the same hours, maybe now producing more.
The way to better leverage this is to build your own company, I know this is not as simple as saying it but the gap is widening and it doesn't look good for employees.
As someone with their own company, AI doesn't magically make things better. If anything, it makes it worse since you have far more competition from other people who are not good at programming but are good at sales/marketing.
It's like with the music industry, it got easier for anyone to make music/release music in theory. Meanwhile for the last 100 years there's mostly been more concentration/consolidation.
If you're an employee, that's true - but as a founder of a small SaaS I genuinely work about 1-2 hours less and get more time walking with my dog through nature. I now have the luxury of concentrating on building the core product and writing articles for the blog and AI handles the things I'm less good at or passionate about, including marketing and content distribution, accounting, building the website (which admittedly looks a bit AI-y, but still much better than my handmade version), answering simple customer requests and escalating complicated ones to me and so on.
Meanwhile, I get to do more of what I enjoy. Of course, it's always tempting to let Codex work on the core product itself - but I resisted that urge so far as I feel a strong sense of ownership and craftsmanship - plus its the thing I actually like doing.
I recently made a change because I felt the same way. I think it was primarily my phone. I had my full agent setup accessible via my phone and was able to be as productive as being on my machine wherever I was. This made it so any thought, or tickle of the mind resulted in me whipping out my phone, firing off a prompt, and iterating until it got it right.
I switched to a dumb flip phone as my primary device and now my work mostly only gets done on my computer during work hours. I obviously still have my iPhone and I sometimes take it on walks during the day if I want to have a productive walk, but it mostly stays plugged in in my drawer.
I always thought I wanted to be constantly connected to my dev environment and be able to work from anywhere, but it turns out that adds way too much noise to my life and is a net negative. I was constantly thinking about work and then able to act on those thoughts so the cycle just continued until I fell asleep.
Hm thats great insight. My phone contributes a loit to my phychosis and bursts. I check what my sessions are doing, i spin up new ones etc. If i distance my phone at least i ll stick more to the trad 9-5 schedule.
> I obviously still have my iPhone and I sometimes take it on walks during the day if I want to have a productive walk, but it mostly stays plugged in in my drawer.
You and I have different definitions of a productive walk. To me a walk is productive if I get my heart beating fast. Bonus points if I see an unusual bird or insect.
This reminds me that I absolutely love having a voice phone conversations in other words the old way. No video no battery drain simple high bandwidth voice to voice
the amount of work I get done increased exponentially, but so did the number of things I have to keep track of in my head. it's tempting to just YOLO everything to the AI, but "the AI did it" isn't really an excuse when production goes down.
Honestly, skimming through it, the writing style made it pretty obvious to that it had been written by an AI. Pangram also indicates that the text is "100% AI-generated." The disclaimer isn't even honest, I doubt AI helped to just build a "draft" of this article...
I know, this ship has long sailed, but I just can't get used and accept this kind of writing.
I use ai as I program every day and I find it useful. I also use it for tech support for myself and my home server. The other day I used it to make some changes in my server and I felt like I accomplished tons. But when I thought about it in the evening I realized I could have got it done with less time if I had just read some documents - the ai advice was often out-of-date and I notice that while programming too - for example, I use the spring-ai framework which has changed massively between versions and the ai always gives old advice....
So on average I would say I'm getting about as much work done now as before ai.
I've never felt that AI allowed me to do less work. That seems flawed. I have experienced that it allows me to do more work in the same (or less) amount of time.
OP is working for the wrong employer. I’m working less because I don’t work for a Silicon Valley sweat shop.
There’s a life hack for this and it’s called “being paid below market average and your employer having no better options.”
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. Another mistake on OP’s part. The worst leaders at my company are the ones who think they should still be submitting PRs.
> 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]
Technological innovations have never meant less work for the worker. It's the bosses/company that benefit from being able to squeeze you that little bit more.
Want to do less work? Join a union and campaign for a 4-day work week or something. If the productivity benefit from AI is real, there's no reason you shouldn't be paid the same for less time because your output is the same/better.
> If the productivity benefit from AI is real, there's no reason you shouldn't be paid the same for less time because your output is the same/better.
That reasoning makes sense in a world where people are paid in proportion to the value they create. But it doesn't make sense in a world where supply and demand determine the price paid for something. Because if you can do the same work in less time in means you've actually increased the supply of producing things and thus decreased its worth.
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)
They aren’t paying more for productivity because they themselves aren’t earning more for productivity. The elephant in the room is that customers don’t have any more money to spend. Certainly not in this economy.
In manufacturing, an oversupply of finished product quickly leads to overfull warehouses, and the company knows to slow down production until product moves.
In software it’s less visible. Features that nobody is buying don’t physically pile up in the shipping department. Decades of accounting for all programmer time as productivity has left managers with limited ability to recognize time spent building unnecessary bloat as a loss. Maintenance burden isn’t fully recognized as a loss, either. We tend to assume it’s roughly equivalent to profit, the same as all other code the programmers churn out.
And what you are seeing now is that it was always a myth. Not everything you do at work is profitable or productive, and AI is causing that fraction to decrease. So of course they aren’t going to pay you more for it.
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.
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.
you never worked more before because considering AI-Based coding you're extremely more efficient in every task you accomplish. Everything is solved faster, and that makes more problems to come. It's like an unevitable escalation. Such putting your pedal on full gas without knowing how to leave it from there.
No. Actually some things take longer and lead to worse outcomes. AI tools invent problems and find work for themselves while also failing at their stated tasks in opaque ways all the damn time. It's obnoxious and why so many repos are stupidly large for no good reason.
Realistically there were only ever two possible outcomes: you do more work for the same amount of money, or you’re one of the ones who were laid off and your work was transferred to the former.
The only way it will result in less work and the same or better quality of life is if you’re self-employed or are employed by a compassionate human. Sadly that does not apply to the majority of people.
It seems like a pretty common misunderstanding in rank-and-file AI-boosterism. I'm guessing that reflects their initial experience, before their employer adjusts their expectations, extrapolated out to infinity. Your correct understanding makes AI sound like a bad deal for workers (and it is), so my theory AI-enthusiastic boosters have to engage in a degree of reality distortion to keep up their enthusiasm.
I don't understand what kind of society we're building right now. Anthropic and other AI labs at $20T valuations, the 1% monopolizing all the wealth and the rest of us out of a job and fighting for the scraps?
There seems to be some sort of magical thinking within the AI crowd at the moment, that it'll all work itself out in the end.
- Build the God Machine
- ??????
- POST-SCARCITY UTOPIA!
Large companies have been spending millions in propaganda and attacks to ensure that people in the US think that unions are pure communism. By the time we get enough people to make a difference there may be T100's stepping on our bones at this point.
What stops me from working more than others is being smarter than my competitors right now. Not being smarter in any objective, fixed way. To keep it that way I must constantly evolved, learn.
Yes, micromanaging AIs is more intense for me than coding, and feels more tiring, I hope that (or I) will change, somehow.
Apparently, minute hands were added to clocks so factory owners could extract more work from their employees.
Medieval people used to own more property (though not technologically equivalent of course) and "owned" more of their time than the average person today.
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As for the title of this post, I can testify to that: As a solo coder, AI has actually increased the amount of work I do - but in a good way!
Even on non vibe-coded stuff, AI reviews keep helping me finding bugs and inconsistencies to fix that would have taken ages to even notice on my own
but more than that, whenever I have the faintest idea about anything, I can immediately put it to practice and explore it further or move on to other ideas.
Even when I'm outdoors away from my computer doing some normal life stuff in meatspace, I often think of stuff and pull out my phone and open the ChatGPT app to remote into my computer's Codex.
This is actually fun.
If union A is like "work less let AI take the slack" and union B is like "work the same, use AI to achieve more, let AI help us win" I'm joining union B every time.
For example waste management generally has very strong unions in the developed world because 1) capital intensity 2) operations immediately seize on labour withdrawal 3) consequences of strikes are in a golden zone of painful but not existential so are tolerated 4) extract a relatively small proportion of local gov funds, so don’t create that much powerful opposition 5) labour force is locally concentrated and highly socialised.
Those pillars of power don’t rely much on any particular legal or political system.
So that means shipping higher quality, faster, with more features, and for a lower end price.
Once you go from horse to tractor the fields increase but work hours doesn't decrease. And if you still use a horse, you are outperformed by the tractor guys who will sell stuff at less the price that you can sustain.
This abstract value you mention is the same dictionary that managers use and I believe they often confuse themselves with that.
An increase in efficiency in and of itself, maybe, but there is no such thing. The increase in efficiency has largely come from deskilling the job. Deskilling the job makes the employees time less valuable, because they can be substituted for another more easily.
[edit: it's important to mention that this is compatible with programmer ego trips. I consider myself a reasonably good programmer and I've been doing it for a long time, but AI has made me far more eligible for jobs in languages that I have never used on platforms that I have never worked with.]
But another factor is that just because you can do work faster doesn't mean there's more work to do, so if you were hitting all your deadlines before with two employees, now you can fire one. Which one that will be is the result of a reverse wage auction.
That's not that self evident yet. If AI is a multiplier it might be the other way around i.e. can a $300k engineer + unlimited tokens generate more a $200k in extra value compared to a $100k engineer? That should be much easier to achieve with AI than without it? The more you spend on tokens the more it makes sense to hire the most highly skilled people you can find since their salaries are no longer that significant.
I don't think the dynamics are similar to what they are e.g. during the industrial revolution since AI is more than capable of clicking the submit button on its own.
The issue is that wages are based on supply and demand and rarely directly related to how much value you generate.
Shouldn’t they now pay more for more work?
The amount of mental energy saved, and downright stimulation gained from seeing rapid feedback in a tight loop is making my workday much easier. I have enough left to continue it longer.
That is not something that should be celebrated.
It is a warning sign.
You're right that this would be awful if mandatory.
but it often was socially mandatory!
At least when those times come, the work can go much further before I have to actually "check in" vs doing some well-trod analysis via automation I've set up. That's great!
It’s a mixed bag. I would say the worst part is that the increased level of output AND the increased level of tech debt is becoming accepted as the norm.
Also, as someone who has been self employed I can tell you that you're working 2x-3x as much as someone who is employed and you have to pay more in taxes.
Otherwise most of us would still toil on the fields just to harvest a tiny bit more food than our immediate family needs.
Yes but the number of people who actually worked on the R&D and the amount of time they spent on it is absolutely insignificant on the grand scale of things.
How did that work out in 1933?
There are limits to how much an economy can shake up before structural problems appear that means when the music stops there is no chair anywhere for you to sit in.
>At any moment in time there are growth areas in the economy
For bread line server?
Worse with the modern world you're not just competing with your neighbor, you're competing with the entire world and if the other parts of the world have lower costs you can quickly find yourself in a trap.
I guess the idea that AI will do all the work and either take care of us or kill us all. Which will probably happen, but the transition takes years and in the meantime we work much harder. People were expecting a fast takeoff.
(1) More tech doesn't save time if it's developed in the direction/dimension of more information flow. Because it seems that the best environment for creativity is a somewhat restricted environment of information. And if one needs to engage with information to take advantage of this new tech, it actually impedes creativity.
(2) A lot of the grunt work that we seem to be automating also encourages creativity. From what I've observed from many artists and programmers (I hang out with both), it seems that creativity strikes best when it's not forced, and the "downtime" doing grunt work actually accelerates it.
So I think that AI breaks these two principles (minimal information and the removal of the crucial grunt work), and actually makes us work more for less.
The only gains seem to be those short-term kinds (a program can be made faster, rewards can be reaped by senior people who have thought about stuff for a while), rather than encouraging a healthy environment of creativity....
Every technology, even technologies that are, from the limited and naive perspective of the user, "free" (LLms can do what I used to do a lot faster than I can, and I don't need to maintain them right?) is not actually free. All technologies bring about their own demands and need for maintenance. Often they don't actually eliminate labor, they just shift it to new areas.
Consider LLMs. Even at the user level they have created their own information ecosystem and new grunt work and overhead. Now you have to prompt, you need to organize and manage context, skills, memory. You need to keep up with model releases. You need to be more vigilant reviewing things, the list goes on.
At a higher level they create even more toil, we need to maintain vast electrical supports and data infrastructure, data needs to be amassed continually for training, the information environment needs to be filtered and sorted more than ever as it gets flooded with slop.
This is the grand irony of technology. It's actually pretty rare for it to just be a total labor saving device. More often its real benefit is rearrangement of the world's structure and resources to move labor to more optimal places for certain needs (for example water supply systems).
This rearrangement also often rearranged financial resources and power. The big problem with LLMs today is that this aspect of the rearrangement is one of great concentration, and it's concerning (employers having a lot more power to extract labor from employees is one example)
So the result is noticeably worse, but you basically must do it, because the efficiency gains are inescapable. This makes the work seem even more pointless, adding to the feeling that you're working more and accomplishing less.
What it seems to miss is that we get to walk around while doing some work, not the other way around. The alternative would be being stuck at a desk or in a meeting room, not quietly enjoying nature on a day off.
> quietly enjoying nature on a day off
You seem to have your concepts mixed up!
I for one much prefer to do work at a desk instead of wandering around.
In the end it was just a hassle and a distraction. I’d rather have 5 solid hours of work and 5 hours of non-work, rather than 10 hours of an awkward hybrid.
Or you would be unemployed and nervous about how you were going to pay your bills, replaced by someone willing to do the same work for lower cost while chained to said desk.
Also, you are telling me that you can get only with voice interaction an AI to write well engineered and maintainable code, something I've yet to see an AI be able to do, to me the result that they tend is at best the same of a junior developer, except that the junior developer learns, the AI continues to make the same mistakes (because it's context is limited, when it's full it's full).
The pitch was that same amount of work would be delivered 10 times faster. Meaning you would do 10 times more work in the same time span.
No employer will ever pitch you 4 hour work week, only Tim Ferriss.
edit: It is actually kinda funny. One would think that we would embrace it the full spectrum now as we could have the best of both worlds ( logic and language side by side solving humanity's problems ).
For example, skills with sales are far more important than actual software engineering.
99.99% of software business is marketing..lol
There's an alternate employment arrangement...
Both of us feel the AI fatigue from time to time.
My personal analysis is that the speed went up, with this the bandwith of different topics. Other factors that weigh in are a not lowering learning curve inside the heavily iterating AI sector and the chattiness of the Agents. If not stopped they produce so much facts that it kills me. I started constantly working on this to stop the waterfall of facts and get ontop of it.
Still not succeeded :)
The way to better leverage this is to build your own company, I know this is not as simple as saying it but the gap is widening and it doesn't look good for employees.
Meanwhile, I get to do more of what I enjoy. Of course, it's always tempting to let Codex work on the core product itself - but I resisted that urge so far as I feel a strong sense of ownership and craftsmanship - plus its the thing I actually like doing.
Even though everyone has the same tools and it can clearly be seen not everyone has the same output.
I switched to a dumb flip phone as my primary device and now my work mostly only gets done on my computer during work hours. I obviously still have my iPhone and I sometimes take it on walks during the day if I want to have a productive walk, but it mostly stays plugged in in my drawer.
I always thought I wanted to be constantly connected to my dev environment and be able to work from anywhere, but it turns out that adds way too much noise to my life and is a net negative. I was constantly thinking about work and then able to act on those thoughts so the cycle just continued until I fell asleep.
You and I have different definitions of a productive walk. To me a walk is productive if I get my heart beating fast. Bonus points if I see an unusual bird or insect.
For those still employed—buckle up!
I know, this ship has long sailed, but I just can't get used and accept this kind of writing.
So on average I would say I'm getting about as much work done now as before ai.
There’s a life hack for this and it’s called “being paid below market average and your employer having no better options.”
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. Another mistake on OP’s part. The worst leaders at my company are the ones who think they should still be submitting PRs.
OP can’t blame AI for their own mismanagement.
> 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-...
'You should be able to work 7x as hard now'
Not sure where he got the multiplier, but I gently tried to educate him what AI actually does and does not do over time.
Want to do less work? Join a union and campaign for a 4-day work week or something. If the productivity benefit from AI is real, there's no reason you shouldn't be paid the same for less time because your output is the same/better.
That reasoning makes sense in a world where people are paid in proportion to the value they create. But it doesn't make sense in a world where supply and demand determine the price paid for something. Because if you can do the same work in less time in means you've actually increased the supply of producing things and thus decreased its worth.
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)
In manufacturing, an oversupply of finished product quickly leads to overfull warehouses, and the company knows to slow down production until product moves.
In software it’s less visible. Features that nobody is buying don’t physically pile up in the shipping department. Decades of accounting for all programmer time as productivity has left managers with limited ability to recognize time spent building unnecessary bloat as a loss. Maintenance burden isn’t fully recognized as a loss, either. We tend to assume it’s roughly equivalent to profit, the same as all other code the programmers churn out.
And what you are seeing now is that it was always a myth. Not everything you do at work is profitable or productive, and AI is causing that fraction to decrease. So of course they aren’t going to pay you more for it.
"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.