AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/9/ai-intensifies-work/

by walterbell • 5 months ago

260 305 5 months ago

simonwillison.net

Original article: https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies...

erelong• 5 months ago

Doesn't have to be that way, it's about managers being realistic and not pushing people too far

Pingk• 5 months ago

You do it to yourself, you do, and that's why it really hurts.

Importantly, the company did not mandate AI use (though it did offer enterprise subscriptions to commercially available AI tools). On their own initiative workers did more because AI made “doing more” feel possible, accessible, and in many cases intrinsically rewarding.

wiseowise7• 5 months ago

Managers don’t even need to push anything. FOMO does all the work.

Overheard a couple of conversations in the office how one IC spent all weekend setting up OpenClaw, another was vibe coding some bullshit application.

I see hundreds of crazy people in our company Slack just posting/reposting twitter hype threads and coming up with ridiculous ideas how to “optimize” workflow with AI.

Once this becomes the baseline, you’ll be seen as the slow one, because you’re not doing 5x work for the same pay.

co_king_323• 5 months ago

Don't worry about these people.

These are internet cult victims.

bilekas2• 5 months ago

I've had conversations with people recently who are losing sleep because they're finding building yet another feature with "just one more prompt" irresistible.

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.

fhd24• 5 months ago

What kills me personally is that I'm constantly 80% there, but the remaining 20% can be just insurmountable. It's really like gambling: Just one more round and it'll be useful, OK, not quite, just one more, for hours.

gedy• 5 months ago

And let's get real: AI companies will not be satisfied with you paying $20 or even $200 month if you can actually develop your product in a few days with their agents. They are either going to charge a lot more or string you along chasing that 20%.

CSSer• 5 months ago

Do you mean in terms of adding one more feature or in terms of how a feature you're adding almost works but not quite right?

I find the latter a lot more challenging to cut my losses when it's on a good run (and often even when I know I could just write this by hand), especially because there's as much if not more intrigue about whether the tool can accomplish it or not. These are the moments where my mind has drifted to think about it the exact way you describe it here.

co_king_323• 5 months ago

If you think it's getting 80% right on its own, you're a victim of Anthropic and OpenAI's propaganda.

jmkni2• 5 months ago

Gambling is a great analogy, my lucks going to turn around, just one more prompt

fhd24• 5 months ago

I feel agentic development is a time sink.

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.

rvz4• 5 months ago

If you do not know what you want to build, how to ask the AI what you want and are unable to tell what the correct requirements are; then it becomes a waste of time and money.

More importantly, As the problem becomes more complex, it then matters more if you know where the AI falls short.

Case study: Security researchers were having a great time finding vulnerabilities and security holes in Openclaw.

The Openclaw creators had a very limited background in security even when the AI entirely built Openclaw and the authors had to collaborate with the security experts to secure the whole project.

yason• 5 months ago

If you do not know what you want to build

That describes the majority of cases actually worth working on as a programmer in the traditional sense of the word. You build something to begin to discover the correct requirements and to picture the real problem domain in question.

yieldcrv4• 5 months ago

with agentic development, I've finally considered doing open source work for no reason aside from a utility existing

before, I would narrow things down to only the most potentially economically viable, and laugh at ideas guys that were married to the one single idea in their life as if it was their only chance, seemingly not realizing they were competing with people that get multiple ideas a day

back to the aforementioned epiphany, it reminds me of the world of Star Trek where everything was developed for its curiosity and utility instead of money

darkwater3• 5 months ago

Previously, I'd have an idea, sit on it for a while.
With agentic development, I have an idea, waste a few hours chasing it,

What's the difference between these 2 periods? Weren't you wasting time when sitting on it and thinking about your idea?

shakna• 5 months ago

Sitting on an idea doesn't necessarily mean being inactive. You can think at the same time as doing something else. "Shower thoughts" are often born of that process.

latexr7• 5 months ago

Sitting on an idea doesn’t have to mean literally sitting and staring at the ceiling, thinking about it. It means you have an idea and let it stew for a while, your mind coming back to it on its own while you’re taking a shower, doing the dishes, going for a walk… The idea which never comes back is the one you abandon and would’ve been a waste of time to pursue. The idea which continues to be interesting and popping into your head is the worthwhile one.

When you jump straight into execution because it’s easy to do so, you lose the distinction.

jcims• 5 months ago

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

How much of this is because you don't trust the result?

I've found this same pattern in myself, and I think the lack of faith that the output is worth asking others to believe in is why it's a throwaway for me. Just yesterday someone mentioned a project underway in a meeting that I had ostensibly solved six months ago, but I didn't even demo it because I didn't have any real confidence in it.

I do find that's changing for myself. I actually did demo something last week that I 'orchestrated into existence' with these tools. In part because the goal of the demo was to share a vision of a target state rather than the product itself. But also because I'm much more confident in the output. In part because the tools are better, but also because I've started to take a more active role in understanding how it works.

Even if the LLMs come to a standstill in their ability to generate code, I think the practice of software development with them will continue to mature to a point where many (including myself) will start to have more confidence in the products.

energy1232• 5 months ago

That's weird, I'm the opposite. Previously I would start coding immediately, because writing the code helps me figure out the what and the how, and because I'd end up with modular/reusable bits that will be helpful later anyway.

Now I sit on an idea for a long time, writing documentation/specs/requirements because I know that the code generation side of things is automated and effortlessly follows from exhaustive requirements.

sisnxb• 5 months ago

I used to do this, but found scoping my agent usage down to smaller chunks got better results than trying to do it all from the get go. And looking back it makes sense - code is the most expressive form we have to tell the computer what to do, not English.

The size of the chunk varies heavily on what I’m doing ofc.

lelanthran4• 5 months ago

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

My experience with LLMs is that they will call any idea a good idea, one feasible enough to pursue!

Their training to be a people-pleaser overrides almost everything else.

croisillon• 5 months ago

it might depend how you word it, i specifically asked about a caldav and a firefox sync solution, explaining how much difficulty-adverse i was, and i have been berated both times

maininformer• 5 months ago

I have found that attending to one task keeps me going for longer.

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

co_king_323• 5 months ago

Isn't the point of AI that you can scroll endlessly while something else works for you?

If you're going to stay single-minded, why wouldn't you just write the code yourself? You're going to have to double check and rewrite the AI's shitty work anyway

mrtksn3• 5 months ago

Computer languages were the lathe for shaping the machines to make them do whatever we want, AI is a CNC. Another abstraction layer for making machines do whatever we want them to do.

taosx• 5 months ago

I don't disagree with the concept of AI being another abstraction layer (maybe) but I feel that's an insult to a CNC machine which is a very precise and accurate tool.

mrtksn3• 5 months ago

LLMs are quite accurate for programming, these days they almost always create a code that will compile without errors and errors are almost always fixable by feeding the error into the LLM. I would say this is extremely precise text generation, much better than most humans.

Just like with CNC though, you need to feed it with the correct instructions. It's still on you for the machined output to do the expected thing. CNC's are also not perfect and their operators need to know the intricacies of machining.

falloutx8• 5 months ago

100% disagree. CNC is a precision machine while AI is the literal opposite of precision.

rvz4• 5 months ago

Tell them again.

co_king_323• 5 months ago

AI is one of those early-2000s SUVs that gets 8 miles to the gallon and has a TV screen in the back of every seat.

It's about presenting externally as a "bad ass" while:

A) Constantly drowning out every moment of your life with low quality background noise.

B) Aggressively polluting the environment and depleting our natural resources for no reason beyond pure arrogance.

co_king_323• 5 months ago

I feel that the popularization of bloated UI "frameworks", like React and Electron, coupled with the inefficiency tolerated in the "JS ecosystem" have been precursors to this dynamic.

It seems perfectly fitting to me that Anthropic is using a wildly overcomplicated React renderer in their TUI.

React devs are the perfect use case for "AI" dev tools. It is perfectly tolerated for them to write highly inefficient code, and these frameworks are both:

A) Arcane and inconsistently documented

B) Heavily overrepresented in open-source

Meaning there are meaningful gains to be had from querying these "AI" tools for framework development.

In my opinion, the shared problem is the acceptance of egregious inefficiency.

rvz4• 5 months ago

Maybe it would be much better to just link to the original article instead of somewhere else for the full context to read. [0]

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

wiseowise7• 5 months ago

It is in the title if you open the page.

singularfutur• 5 months ago

This is not a technology problem. AI intensifies work because management turns every efficiency gain into higher output quotas. The solution is labor organization, not better software.

ap995• 5 months ago

This argument has been used against every new technology since forever.

And the initial gut reaction is to resist by organizing labor.

Companies that succumb to organized labor get locked into that speed of operating. New companies get created that adopt 'the new thing' and blow old companies away.

Repeat.

foxes• 5 months ago

Maybe society shouldnt be optimising for that.

falloutx8• 5 months ago

And the initial gut reaction is to resist by organizing labor.

Yeah like tech workers have similar rights to union workers. We literally have 0 power compared to any previous group of workers. Organizing of labour cant even happen in tech as tech has large percentage of immigrant labour who have even less rights than citizens.

Also there is no shared pain like union workers had, we all have been given different incentives, working under different corporations so without shared pain its impossible to organize. AI is the first shared pain we had, and even this caused no resistance from tech workers. Resistance has come from the users, which is the first good sign. Consumers have shown more ethics than workers and we have to applaud that. Any resistance to buying chatbot subscriptions has to be celebrated.

wiseowise7• 5 months ago

So race to the bottom where you work more and make less per unit of work? Great deal, splendid idea.

The only winners here are CEOs/founders who make obscene money, liquidate/retire early while suckers are on the infinite treadmill justifying their existence.

wolfcola4• 5 months ago

Do you like working 8 hours a day instead of 12? 5 days a week instead of 7? You can thank organized labor.

MrBuddyCasino5• 5 months ago

The leftist thought process never ceases to amaze me:

"This time, its going to be the correct version of socialism."

elicash3• 5 months ago

You can be libertarian and a capitalist and still be pro-union. At the end of the day, a Collective Bargaining Agreement is just a private contract between two parties. It can be a way to raise wages without government setting a minimum price for labor.

While I'd agree most of its proponents (like myself) also favor other left-wing policies, I'm just saying it doesn't need to be.

9rx7• 5 months ago

Labor organization is the solution on the right. The left believes in regulation.

zozbot2345• 5 months ago

The driving force is not management or even developers, it's always the end users. They get to do more with less, thanks to the growing output. This is something to the celebrated, not a problem to be "solved" with artificial quotas.

bckr2• 5 months ago

Labor organization yes! I don't quite know how to achieve it. I also worry that my desire to become a manager is in direct conflict with my desire to contribute to labor organization.

On a separate note, I have the intensification problem in my personal work as well. I sit down to study, but, first, let me just ask Claude to do some research in the background... Oh, and how is my Cursor doing on the dashboard? Ah, right, studying... Oh, Claude is done...

co_king_323• 5 months ago

I don't quite know how to achieve it.

Definitely not by posting on right-wing social media websites.

I also worry that my desire to become a manager is in direct conflict with my desire to contribute to labor organization.

It is.

9rx7• 5 months ago

I also worry that my desire to become a manager is in direct conflict with my desire to contribute to labor organization.

Nah. You can definitely do both. A labor organization of any meaningful size needs management. A labor union is effectively a business in its own right, after all. Some unions even opt to register as corporations, and some unions even see unions rise up to protect workers from the larger union!

And certainly a tech union, to be effective, would have to be humongous given how easy it is to move the work around.

sawmurai2• 5 months ago

I am all for labor organization. I just don’t see how it would be of benefit in this particular case.

co_king_323• 5 months ago

If I'm not mistaken it would appear that you're saying that you are in fact *not* for labor organization in this case.

TFYS• 5 months ago

Why does management turn efficiency gains into higher output quotas? Because competition forced them to. This is a feature of free market capitalism. A single participant can't decide to keep output as is when efficiency improves, because it will lose the competition to those that increase output. Labor organization could be the solution if it was global. Labor organizations that are based in a single country will just lead to work moving to countries without labor organization.

This problem of efficiency gains never translating to more free time is a problem deep in our economic system. If we want a fix, we need to change the whole system.

localhoster• 5 months ago

TBH, I have found AI addictive, you use it for the first time, and its incredible. You get a nice kick of dopamine. This kick of dopamine, is decreasing with every win you get. What once felt incredible, is just another prompt today.

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.

altmanaltman• 5 months ago

If what once felt incredible is just another prompt today, what is incredible today? Addictive personalities usually double down to get a bigger dopamine kick - that's why they stay addicted. So I don't think you truly found it addictive in the conventional sense of the term. Also excercising the brain has been optional in software for quite a while tbh.

rtrav2• 5 months ago

Apart from the addicts, AI also helps the liars, marketeers and bloggers. You can outsource the lies to the AI.

ap995• 5 months ago

Yeah if you want to keep your edge you have to find other ways to work your programming brain.

But as far as output - we all have different reasons for enjoying software development but for me it's more making something useful and less in the coding itself. AI makes the fun parts more fun and the less fun parts almost invisible (at small scale).

We'll all have to wrestle with this going forward.

co_king_323• 5 months ago

If you use an LLM you've given up your edge.

raincole• 5 months ago

Isn't it just like programming?

Many of programmers became programmers because they find the idea of programming fascinating, probably in their middle school days. And then they went to be professionals. Then they burned out and if they were lucky, transited to management.

Of course not everyone is like that, but you can't say it isn't common, right.

m_fayer• 5 months ago

What felt incredible was getting the setup and prompting right and then producing reasonable working code at 50x human speed. And you're right, that doesn't excite after a while.

But I've found my way to what, for me, is a more durable and substantial source of satisfaction, if not excitement, and that is value. Excuse the cliche, but its true.

My life has been filled with little utilities that I've been meaning to put together for years but never found the time. My homelab is full of various little applications that I use, that are backed up and managed properly. My home automation does more than it ever did, and my cabin in the countryside is monitored and adaptive to conditions to a whole new degree of sophistication. I have scripts and workflows to deal with a fairly significant administrative load - filing and accounting is largely automated, and I have a decent approximation of an always up-to-date accountant and lawyer on hand. Paper letters and PDFs are processed like its nothing.

Does all the code that was written at machine-speed to achieve these things thrill me? No, that's the new normal. Is the fact that I'm clawing back time, making my Earthly affairs orderly in a whole new way, and breathing software-life into my surroundings without any cloud or big-tech encroachment thrilling? Yes, sometimes - but more importantly it's satisfying and calming.

As far as using my brain - I devote as much of my cognitive energy to these things as I ever have, but now with far more to show for it. As the agents work for me, I try to learn and validate everything they do, and I'm the one stitching it all into a big cohesive picture. Like directing a film. And this is a new feeling.

kaffekaka• 5 months ago

I can only speak for myself of course, but injecting software into all those processes to me seems like a source of stress more than something calming.

The best technology is the one we don't even need to use.

nilsherzig• 5 months ago

I think the randomness is addicting. While writing a prompt often doesn't result in the perfect outcome, it very well could. Pressing the "prompt lever" (again and again), waiting for the result to show up looks a lot like gambling.

See "Variable Ratio Schedule" https://www.simplypsychology.org/schedules-of-reinforcement....

iainctduncan• 5 months ago

This. This is what people aren't talking about. LLMs are like slot machines for developers, and slot machines are fucking awful for your brain.

wiseowise7• 5 months ago

I've had conversations with people recently who are losing sleep because they're finding building yet another feature with "just one more prompt" irresistible.

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.

manuelmoreale• 5 months ago

There's a word for that mindset: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karoshi

yieldcrv4• 5 months ago

this matches my experience

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

wiseowise7• 5 months ago

Hopefully it will be like an Ebola virus, so that everyone will see how deadly it is instead of like smoking where you die of cancer 40 years down the line.

yieldcrv4• 5 months ago

I think I'll have a happier medium when I get additional inputs set up, such as just talking to a CLI running my full code base on a VPS, but through my phone and airpods, only when it needs help

at least I won't be vegetating at a laptop, or shirking other possible responsibilities to get back to a laptop

co_king_323• 5 months ago

Frankly, it seems more like the Crack epidemic to me.

everdrive• 5 months ago

People are a gas, and they expand to fill the space they're in. Tools that produce more work do make people's lives easier, they mean an individual just needs to do more work using their tools to do so. This is a disposition that most people have, and therefore it's unavoidable. AI is not exciting to me. I only need to use it so I don't fall behind my peers. Why would I ever be interested in that?

graemep3• 5 months ago

"Word expands to fill the time available"

graemep3• 5 months ago

Bad typo there "work expands to fill the time available"

latexr7• 5 months ago

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

zozbot2345• 5 months ago

Discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945755

captainmuon• 5 months ago

It's like the invention of the power loom, but for knowledge workers. Might be interesting to look at the history of industrialisation and the reactions to it.

falloutx8• 5 months ago

I am becoming more and more convinced that AI cant be used to make something better than what could have built before AI.

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.

pousada• 5 months ago

percentage of good, well planned, consistent and coherent software is going to approach zero

So everything stays exactly the same?

Chance-Device• 5 months ago

Underrated comment. The reason that everyone complains about code all the time is because most code is bad, and it’s written by humans. I think this can only be a step up. Nailing validation is the trick now.

falloutx8• 5 months ago

I get this comment everytime I say this but there are levels to this. What you think is bad today could be considered artisan when things become worse than today.

co_king_323• 5 months ago

So everything stays exactly the same?

No, we get applications so hideously inefficient that your $3000 developer machine feels like it it's running a Pentium II with 256 MB of RAM.

We get software that's as slow as it was 30 years ago, for no reason other than our own arrogance and apathy.

gosub100• 5 months ago

No, wealth gets more concentrated. Fewer people on the team will be able to afford a comfortable lifestyle and save for retirement. More will edge infinitesimally closer to "barely scraping by".

zsoltkacsandi3• 5 months ago

Completely agree. There is a common misunderstanding/misconception in product development, that more features = better product.

I’ve never seen a product/project manager questioning themselves: does this feature add any value? Should we remove it?

In agile methodologies we measure the output of the developers. But we don’t care about that the output carries any meaningful value to the end user/business.

antupis• 5 months ago

It’s more about operational resilience and serving customers than product development. If you run early WhatsApp like organisation just 1 person leaving can create awful problems. Same for serving customers especially big clients need all kinds of reports and resources that skeleton organisation can not provide.

9rx7• 5 months ago

I’ve never seen a product/project manager questioning themselves: does this feature add any value? Should we remove it?

To be fair, it is a hard question to contend with. It is easier to keep users who don't know what they're missing happier than users who lost something they now know they want. Even fixing bugs can sometimes upset users who have come to depend on the bug as a feature.

In agile methodologies we measure the output of the developers.

No we don't. "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools". You are bound to notice a developer with poor output as you interact with them, but explicitly measure them you will not. Remember, agile is all about removing managers from the picture. Without managers, who is even going to do the measuring?

There are quite a few pre-agile methodologies out there that try to prepare a development team to operate without managers. It is possible you will find measurement in there, measuring to ensure that the people can handle working without mangers? Even agile itself recognizes in the 12 principles that it requires a team of special people to be able to handle agile.

graemep3• 5 months ago

Its also about marketing. People buy because of features.

The people making the buying decisions may not have a good idea of what maximises "meaningful value" but they compare feature sets.

kvgr5• 5 months ago

I just build a programming language in couple of hours, complete with interpreter with claude code. I know nothing about designing and implementing programming languages: https://github.com/m-o/MoonShot.

oblio3• 5 months ago

You built something.

Now comes the hard or impossible part: is it any good? I would bet against it.

lietuvis• 5 months ago

Took a quick look, this seems like a copy of writing an interpreter in go book by Thorsten Ball, but just much worse.

Also using double equals to mutate variables, why?

falloutx8• 5 months ago

Yes, my point is that it was possible to build it before AI and in much less effort than people imagine. People in college build an interpreter in the less than couple weeks anyway and that probably has more utility.

Consider two scenarios:

1) I try to build an interpreter. I go and read some books, understand the process, build it in 2 weeks. Results: I have a toy interpreter. I understand said toy interpreter. I learnt how to do it, Learnt ideas in the field, applied my knowledge practically.

2) I try to build an interpreter. I go and ask claude to do it. It spits out something which works: Result: I have black box interpreter. I dont understand said interpreter. I didnt build any skills in building it. Took me less than an hour.

Toy interpreter is useless in both scenarios but Scenario one pay for the 2 week effort, while Scenario 2 is a vanity project.

jasode• 5 months ago

, 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.

Many types of software have essential complexity and minimal features that still require hundreds/thousands of software engineers. Having just 4 people is simply not enough man-hours to build the capabilities customers desire.

Complex software like 3D materials modeling and simulation, logistics software like factory and warehouse planning. Even the Linux kernel and userspace has thousands of contributors and the baseline features (drivers, sandbox, GUI, etc) that users want from a modern operating system cannot be done by a 4-person team.

All that said, there a lots of great projects with tiny teams. SQLite is 3 people. Foobar2000 is one person. ShareX screensaver I think is 1 developer in Turkey.

Lalabadie• 5 months ago

But big projects are where the quality of LLM contributions fall the most, and require (continuous, exhausting, thankless) supervision!

misiek08• 5 months ago

I will use my right to disagree. Maybe not 4 people everywhere, but if you have product with well thought feature set you create those and then you really don't need 1000s people to just keep it alive and add features one by one.

I - of course - am talking about perfect approach with everyone focused to not f** it up ;)

cedws4• 5 months ago

I’m finding that the code LLMs produce is just average. Not great, not terrible. Which makes sense, the model is basically a complex representation of the average of its training data right? If I want what I consider ‘good code’ I have to steer it.

So I wouldn’t use LLMs to produce significant chunks of code for something I care about. And publishing vibe coded projects under my own GitHub user feels like it devalues my own work, so for now I’m just not publishing vibe coded projects. Maybe I will eventually, under a ‘pen name.’

rybosworld7• 5 months ago

We've gone from "it's glorified auto-complete" to "the quality of working, end-to-end features, is average", in just ~2 years.

I think it goes without saying that they will be writing "good code" in short time.

I also wonder how much of this "I don't trust them yet" viewpoint is coming from people who are using agents the least.

Is it rare that AI one-shots code that I would be willing to raise as a PR with my name on it? Yes, extremely so (almost never).

Can I write a more-specified prompt that improves the AI's output? Also yes. And the amount of time/effort I spend iterating on a prompt, to shape the feature I want, is decreasing as I learn to use the tools better.

I think the term prompt-engineering became loaded to mean "folks who can write very good one-shot prompts". But that's a silly way of thinking about it imo. Any feature with moderate complexity involves discovery. "Prompt iteration" is more descriptive/accurate imo.

dcre• 5 months ago

People often describe the models as averaging their training data, but even for base models predicting the most likely next token this is imprecise and even misleading, because what is most likely is conditional on the input as well as what has been generated so far. So a strange input will produce a strange output — hardly an average or a reversion to the mean.

On top of that, the models people use have been heavily shaped by reinforcement learning, which rewards something quite different from the most likely next token. So I don’t think it’s clarifying to say “the model is basically a complex representation of the average of its training data.”

The average thing points to the real phenomenon of underspecified inputs leading to generic outputs, but modern agentic coding tools don’t have this problem the way the chat UIs did because they can take arbitrary input from the codebase.

falloutx8• 5 months ago

I was literally creating a 2nd account on github today for this purpose.

imiric• 5 months ago

Wait, surely adding 10x more agents to my project will speed up development, improve the end product, and make me more productive by that same proportion, right?

I will task a few of them to write a perfectly detailed spec up front, break up the project into actionable chunks, and then manage the other workers into producing, reviewing, and deploying the code. Agents can communicate and cooperate now, and hallucination is a solved problem. What could go wrong?

Meanwhile, I can cook or watch a movie, and ocasionally steer them in the right direction. Now I can finally focus on the big picture, instead of getting bogged down by minutiae. My work is so valuable that no AI could ever replace me.

FieryTransition2• 5 months ago

And Unix was mainly made by two people, it's astounding that as I get older, even tech managers don't know "the mythical man month", and how software production generally scales.

thunky2• 5 months ago

Sorry but 99.999% of developers could not have built Unix. Or Winamp.

Managers are crossing their fingers that devs they hire are no worse than average, and average isn't very good.

MyHonestOpinon• 5 months ago

I do agree with this idea in the sense that companies keep trying to add people to projects to do more things or complete projects sooner which ends up wasting a lot of effort. A more cost conscious way is to have smaller teams and let them more time to explore better approaches for longer.

caminante2• 5 months ago

And Unix was mainly made by two people

Speaking of myths, they were part of a team of 4-5 early contributors with the benefit of network effects via Bell Labs.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix#History

sdf2erf5• 5 months ago

What youre pointing at is the trade off between concentration of understanding vs fragmented understanding across more people.

The former is always preferred in the context of product development but poses a key person risk. Apple in its current form is a representation of this - Steve did enough work to keep the company going for a decade after his death. Now its sort-of lost on where to go next. But on the flip side look at its market cap today vs 2000.

prng2021• 5 months ago

“You never needed 1000s of engineers to build software anyway”

What is the point of even mentioning this? We live in reality. In reality, there are countless companies with thousands of engineers making each piece of software. Outside of reality, yes you can talk about a million hypothetical situations. Cherry picking rare examples like Winamp does nothing but provide an example of an exception, which yes, also exists in the real world.

caminante2• 5 months ago

IMHO, it's flamebait. Your quoted text is provably false -- e.g., MSFT Windows, AWS, etc. and appeals to idealism of lean project teams.

level09• 5 months ago

I see it differently.

for me AI has been less about building more/fast, and more about unlocking potential that was always out of reach.

Knowledge gaps that would've taken years to fill, new angles I wouldn't have thought to explore on my own. It's not that it makes more software.

it just makes you more capable of tackling things you couldn't before.

phendrenad2• 5 months ago

You need 1000 engineers because you have poor engineering leadership, or no engineering leadership, and engineering is a black hole that management shovels money into where it falls directly onto a huge plane of middle managers who do the best they can with their limited power and understanding. Meanwhile your sales team is writing specifications for the next version of the product, which they already promised to customers, and they hired an outside consultant to transform it into 500 spec documents written in damn near legalese, which will appear one day on the lead engineer's desk with no foreshadowing. It turns out that throwing more engineers at the problem helps here because you'll run out of tasks to assign to all of them and some will roam the halls and accidentally connect distributed knowledge back together.

bsenftner2• 5 months ago

I've been saying this since ChatGPT first came out: AI enables the lazy to dig intellectual holes they cannot dig out, while also enables those with active critical analysis and good secondary considerations to literally become the fabled 10x or more developer / knowledge worker. Which creates interesting scenarios as AI is being evaluated and adopted: the short sighted are loudly declaring success, which will be short term success, and they are bullying their work-peers that they have the method they all should follow. That method being intellectually lazy, allowing the AI to code for them, which they then verify with testing and believe they are done. Meanwhile, the quiet ones are figuring out how to eliminate the need for their coworkers at all. Managers are observing productivity growth, which falters with the loud ones, but not with those quiet ones... AI is here to make the scientifically minded excel and the short cut takers can footgun themselves out of there.

rtrav2• 5 months ago

Surely managers will finally recognize the contributions of the quiet ones! I cannot believe what I read here.

We just saw the productivity growth in the vibe coded GitHub outages.

bsenftner2• 5 months ago

Don't bet on it. Those managers are the previously loud short sighted thinkers that finagled their way out of coding. Those loud ones are their buddies.

falloutx8• 5 months ago

This is a cope. Managers are not magicians who will finally understand who is good and who is just vibe coding demos. In fact now its gonna become even harder to understand differences for the managers. In fact its more likely that the managers are at the same risk because without a clique of software engineers, they would have nothing to manage.

ChrisMarshallNY• 5 months ago

help avoid burnout

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.

trash_cat• 5 months ago

My two cents that this is part of the learning curve. With collective experience this type of work will be more understood, shared and explored. It is intense in the beginning because we are still discovering how to work with it. I think the other part being that this is a non-deterministic tool which does increase some cognitive load.

blitzar• 5 months ago

I've had conversations with people recently who are losing sleep because they're finding building yet another feature with "just one more prompt" irresistible.

alpha sigma grindset

mentalgear• 5 months ago

I'm also coming to the conclusion that LLMs have basically the same value as when I tried them out with GPT-3 : good for semantic search / debugging. Bad for generation as you constantly have to check it, correct it, and the parts you trust it to get "right" are often those that are biting you afterwards - or if right introduce gaps in your own knowledge that make you slowly inefficient in your "generation controller" role.

co_king_323• 5 months ago

I've been saying since 2024 that these things are not getting meaningfully better at all.

I think these companies have been manipulating social media sentiment for years in order to cover up their bunk product.

aetherspawn2• 5 months ago

Yes, and I’m convinced AI companies either pay or brainwash these people to put out blog posts like this to spread the idea that it actually works. It doesn’t.

Noaidi• 5 months ago

40 years ago when I was a history major in college one of my brilliant professors gave us a book to read called "the myth of domesticity".

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.

debarshri• 5 months ago

intensification = productivity for me.

Xarovin• 5 months ago

I like working on my own projects, and where I found AI really shone was by having something there to bounce ideas off and get feedback.

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.

Flavius2• 5 months ago

This intensification is really a symptom of the race to the bottom. It only feels 'exhausting' for people who don't want to lose their job or business to an agent; for everyone else, the AI is just an excuse to do less.

zozbot2345• 5 months ago

The way you avoid losing your job to an AI agent is not 'intensifying' its use, but learning to drive it better. Much of what people are calling 'intensification' here is really just babysitting and micromanaging their agent because it's perpetually running on vibes and fumes instead of being driven effectively with very long, clearly written (with AI assistance!) prompts and design documents. Writing clear design documentation for your agent is a light, sustainable and even enjoyable activity; babysitting its mistakes is not.

co_king_323• 5 months ago

I'm sorry but if you're losing your job to this shit you were too dumb to make it in the first place.

Edit: Not to mention, this is what you get for not unionizing earlier. Get good or get cut.

Flavius2• 5 months ago

That’s a simplistic take. Displacement isn't about being "dumb", it's about unit economics. A company will replace a brilliant person with a good enough AI if it costs 10% of the salary. The "smart" people who are keeping their jobs are exactly the ones Simon is talking about. They’re being "forced" to work more to prove their value against a machine that never sleeps. That’s the intensification.

digikata• 5 months ago

A couple of historical notes that come to mind.

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.

camgunz• 5 months ago

Comments on the original article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945755

sprightlytogo• 5 months ago

As someone who prefers to do one task at a time, using AI tools makes me feel productive and unproductive at the same time: productive because I am able to do finish my task faster, unproductive because I feel like I am wasting my time while I am waiting for the AI to respond.

latexr7• 5 months ago

the productivity boost these things can provide is exhausting.

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.

wolfcola4• 5 months ago

edited: quote misattributed

ttoinou4• 5 months ago

It’s called the market. If you can compete while providing better life balance, go ahead and compete with those bad companies

simonw14• 5 months ago

That was me quoting the Harvard Business Review article.

alain13• 5 months ago

I find Simon’s blog and TILs to be some of the highest signal to noise content on the internet. I’ve picked up an incredible number of useful tips and tricks. Many of them I would not have found if he did not share things as soon as he discovered something that felt “obvious.” I also love how he documents small snippets and gists of code that are easy to link to and cross-reference. Wish I did more of that myself.

latexr7• 5 months ago

Many of them I would not have found if he did not share things as soon as he discovered something

You don’t know that. For all you know, your life would’ve been richer if you’ve read those thoughts after they’ve been left to stew for longer. For all you know, if that happened you would’ve said “most” instead of “many”. Or maybe not, no one can say for sure until it happens

that felt “obvious.”

It’s not about feeling obvious. There is value in exploring obvious concepts when you’ve thought about them for longer, maybe researched what others before you had to say on the matter, and you can highlight and improve on all of that. Everyone benefits from a thoughtful approach.

I’ve picked up an incredible number of useful tips and tricks. (…) I also love how he documents small snippets and gists of code that are easy to link to and cross-reference.

That is (I think clearly, but I may be wrong) not what I’m talking about. A code snippet is very far removed in meaning from a human insight. What I wrote doesn’t just concern Simon’s readers, but Simon as a person. Being constantly “on” isn’t good, it leads to exhaustion (as reported), which leads to burnout. While my first paragraph in the previous comment was a criticism, it was merely an introduction to the rest of the post which was given in empathy. I want us all to do and be better.

g-mork• 5 months ago

They have established themselves as a reliable communicator of the technology, they are read far and wide, that means they are in a great position to influence the industry-wide tone, and I'm personally glad they are bringing light to this issue. If it upsets you that someone else wrote about something you understood, perhaps consider starting a blog of your own.

co_king_323• 5 months ago

You don’t have to keep churning out multiple blog posts a day, every day.

How do you know that? You don't think he's being paid for all this marketing work?

simonw14• 5 months ago

I'm paid by my GitHub sponsors, who get a monthly summary of what I've been writing about on the basis that I don't want to put a paywall on my content but I'm happy for people to pay me to send them less stuff.

I also make ~$600/month from the ads on my site - run by EthicalAds.

I don't take payment to write about anything. That goes against my principals. It would also be illegal in the USA (FTC rules) if I didn't disclose it - and most importantly it would damage my credibility as a writer, which is the thing I value most.

The big potential money maker here is private consulting based on the expertise (and credibility) I've developed and demonstrated over time. I should do more of that!

I have a set of disclosures here: https://simonwillison.net/about/#disclosures

signatoremo• 5 months ago

Accusing people of being paid shill from a new account. Ironically.

simonw14• 5 months ago

Writing about "the obvious" is a useful service. Often people doubt what their own experience is telling them until someone else helps confirm their suspicions and put them into words.

latexr7• 5 months ago

Seems you wrote this at the same time I was responding to someone else. Since I addressed that point in the other reply, I link there and quote the relevant section.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46955703#46958713

There is value in exploring obvious concepts when you’ve thought about them for longer, maybe researched what others before you had to say on the matter, and you can highlight and improve on all of that. Everyone benefits from a thoughtful approach.

I’m not saying “don’t share the obvious”, because what is obvious to one person won’t be for someone else. What I am advocating for is thinking more before doing so. In your posts I have repeatedly seen you advocate for opposing ideas at different (but not too distant) points in time. Often you also share a half-baked thought which only later gets the nuance it requires.

More often than not, it’s clear the thoughts should have been stewed for longer to develop into better, more powerful and cohesive ideas. Furthermore, that approach will truly give you back time and relaxation. I take no pleasure in you being exhausted, that is a disservice to everyone.

windexh8er4• 5 months ago

The opposite is also true. People often follow people off of a (figurative) cliff because that's what everyone is doing. We have copious toxic online communities to show for that. Most of the conversations around AI are falling into that type of cultish aspect. Look no further than YouTube to find how many born-again-AI-zealots emerged with ClawdBot/MoltBot/OpenClaw. It's just not as obvious in the blogosphere. The thing that is obvious is the constant "findings" that are nothing more than opinions. There's no historical evidence you won't change your mind in 10 minutes. And that's why I feel, as I read them, that these types of blog posts are foundationally built in sand.

windexh8er4• 5 months ago

Simon is a new form of troll and you hit the nail on the head of what: soapboxing the obvious all in the name of AI. Just like the OpenClaw article that hit the FP yesterday, these types of folks are either doing this for marketing or they're really elated by the mediocre. Has Simon actually produced anything novel or compelling? His blog posts surely aren't - so if that's any indication of his work output I wouldn't be surprised if the answer is a hard no.

And, who wants to be working on 3 projects simultaneously? This is the new "multitasking" agenda from generations ago with a new twist: now I just manage prompts and agents, bro! But the reality is: you think you're doing more than you actually are. Maybe Simon is just placating to his inevitable AGI overlords that he will still be useful in the coming Altmania revolution? No idea. Either way half the time I read his posts (only because they're posted here and I'm excited for his new discoveries) I can't stand to stomach his drivel.

simonw14• 5 months ago

Has Simon actually produced anything novel or compelling?

Here are some of my recent posts which I self-evaluate as "novel and compelling".

- Running Pydantic’s Monty Rust sandboxed Python subset in WebAssembly https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/6/pydantic-monty/ - demonstrating how easy and useful it is to be able to turn Rust code into WASM that can run independently or be used inside a Python wheel for Pyodide in order to provide interactive browser demos of Rust libraries.

- Distributing Go binaries like sqlite-scanner through PyPI using go-to-wheel https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/4/distributing-go-binarie... - I think my go-to-wheel utility is really cool, and distributing Go CLIs through PyPI is a neat trick.

- ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages, and download files https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/26/chatgpt-containers/ - in which I reverse engineered and documented a massive new feature of ChatGPT that OpenAI hadn't announced or documented anywhere

I remain very proud of my current open source projects too - https://datasette.io and https://llm.datasette.io and https://sqlite-utils.datasette.io and a whole lot more: https://github.com/simonw/simonw/blob/main/releases.md

Are you ready to say none of that is "novel or compelling", in good faith?

cube002• 5 months ago

You don’t have to keep churning out multiple blog posts a day, every day.

The way Simon offers to send you less content if you sign up for the paid newsletter always made me suspicious that goal could be to overwhelm on purpose.

You feel like you should pay for the curated feed so you won't miss the really important advances in the firehose of content that's pumped out.

simonw14• 5 months ago

Haha, worst business model ever. I'm going to write things daily so people will pay me to write less!

teekert3• 5 months ago

Had a similar experience recently, set up Claude code, wrote plans, CLAUDE.md etc. The plan was to end up with a nice looking hugo/bootstrap/ website.

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...

fendy30023• 5 months ago

Now that you get accustomed with Hugo, I wonder if the way you plan & prompting now will produce better result or not

teekert3• 5 months ago

I probably will, I use AI extensively, but mostly when I can't remember tedious syntax or suspect something can be done in a better way. And that work well for me... If I go too much towards vibe coding, the fun is sucked away for me.

cpursley• 5 months ago

It sort of sounds link you expected a one-shot miracle or am I misreading? Try this: start from scratch and use openspec explore - talk to it about what you are going for, tell it to call the built-in frontend-design skill and install a hugo skill first (https://skills.sh/?q=hugo), context7 for docs and playwright to check it's work via screenshots etc. Also optionally share any websites with the ascetic / layout you are going for. Be very descriptive. Also ask it to teach you about hugo as it goes and explain it's decisions, I'v learned a lot this way.

teekert3• 5 months ago

Well, I wrote a very extensive Claude.md, and expected more of it indeed. Thanks for the tips I’ll try them.

jmkni2• 5 months ago

I find it's most valuable doing stuff I already know how to do, but would take me a long time.

You can watch what it's doing and eyeball the code to know if it's going in the right direction, and then steer it towards what you want.

If you have it doing something you have no clue about then it's total gamble

apexalpha• 5 months ago

I just build my k8s homelab with AI.

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.

dubeye2• 5 months ago

Tell that to my family with whom I have been spending a lot more time recently having benefited a lot from increased productivity.

metaltyphoon• 5 months ago

If increased productivity means your output is the same but now you produce it quicker, sure! But lets be honest, this is rarely the case and the “free” time is now filled with more work.

dubeye2• 5 months ago

That's not likely to be the fault of AI, that's probably a managerial issue or a personal discipline issue.

Klaster_1• 5 months ago

Not if your manager doesn't know what you are really capable of and your coworkers keep at about the same pace as you. Manager may get some portion of that productivity, but who says it has to be everything?

jweatherby• 5 months ago

Same. It's freed up hours to spend with the kids. Time is scarce

jillesvangurp2• 5 months ago

That's the bane of all productivity increasing tools, any time you free up immediately gets consumed by more work.

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.

FeteCommuniste2• 5 months ago

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.

You might be right, but some of us haven't quite warmed to the idea that our new job description will be something like "high-level planner and bot-wrangler," with nary a line of code in sight.

jillesvangurp2• 5 months ago

Change can be upsetting. Compilation used to be done by people. People used to write assembler for a living. Entire languages like Cobol, Fortran, Smalltalk came and went. You might still find paid (well paid even) work doing these things of course but it's a bit niche at this point. Things like Cobol are not likely to be picked for new projects. And unless you work in a museum, anything involving punch cards is probably not a thing anymore. There are a lot of professions that were common fifty years ago that no longer aren't.

I get that people are emotional about change impacting them; and maybe still a bit in denial even. But regardless how people feel, it's probably not going to majorly change the outcome. What I sketched in my earlier comment is that it is maybe not as black and white as jobs disappearing and everybody being out of work. AI tools require people with programming skills to be most effective. That points to a change of the type of work.

Some might resent that and give up or maybe try to stick to their current gigs for as long as they last. I don't think this is all changing overnight. But on a scale of a few years, it's going to impact the job market quite a bit.

lelanthran4• 5 months ago

That's why I'm not worried about losing my job.

Right. Because the demand for hand-written code will be high enough that you will keep your job?

Or did you mean that you expect to lose the current job (writing software) and have a new job (directing an agent to write software)?

You really expect to get paid the same doing a low-skill job (directing an agent) as you did the high-paid one (writing software)?

After all, your examples

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.

Were all, with the exception of the invention of high-level languages, an increase in skill requirements from the practitioners, not a decrease in skill requirements.

veunes3• 5 months ago

The problem isn't the abstraction level, it's the loss of the incubation period. Moving from Assembly to C didn't remove the need to think through data structures. Prompt engineering, however, triggers skipping the reflection stage entirely. Constantly managing bots leaves zero bandwidth for the "are we building garbage?" question. AI scales typing speed, not the speed of architectural decision-making

sph2• 5 months ago

Is a blog reposting other content worth its own post?

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

simonw14• 5 months ago

In this case I don't think so. My post here even links back to the original Hacker News conversation from the "via" link.

sph2• 5 months ago

the circular economy of AI

arealaccount• 5 months ago

Kinda tangental, but the headline gave me a laugh, even has the emdash

aetherspawn2• 5 months ago

I’m convinced all these blog posts on AI productivity are some kind of high level propaganda trying to create a Folie à deux that AI is much better than it is.

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.

cube002• 5 months ago

It certainly feels like a lot of the crypto bros have moved on to being AI bros.

I'm chalking my poor experience to being too cheap to pay $200 a month for Claude Max 20x so I can run the multiple agents that need to supervise each other.

nephihaha• 5 months ago

It does reduce some work. Obvious examples would be copy-writing and fashion modelling.

nwhnwh• 5 months ago

An older fairytale goes this way... humans invented tools to transport them from a place to place faster than ever, and also communication systems that transmit messages faster than ever. Now, everything can be done in less time and they can enjoy the rest. Right?

incomingpain• 5 months ago

AI is described as a partner to help.

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."

songodongo• 5 months ago

Productivity aside, what I notice most at work is that our offshore resources are submitting basically 100% AI generated work. Beyond the code itself, ever since we rolled out Copilot, their English has improved immensely. I have to wonder what is the point of keeping them on if they’re just sub-par prompting all their work.

tzury2• 5 months ago

I would learn more about air combat by listening to a 12 minutes conversation with a jet fighter pilot, than I will from 3-day seminar by air force journalists.

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.

simonw14• 5 months ago

Show me what you shipped with it that isn’t about AI.

From this weekend: https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-history-json and https://github.com/datasette/datasette-sqlite-history-json

tzury2• 5 months ago

Impressive indeed. Was not aware. The comments below all flagged.

JohnCClarke• 5 months ago

When developers who were comfortable as individual contributors start using agentic AI they necessarily start to work somewhat as managers.

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.

devinprater• 5 months ago

Over the past month, with vibe-coding, I've:

* 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.

veunes3• 5 months ago

Validation is always harder than generation. Writing yourself means building context brick by brick. Reviewing AI means reconstructing someone else's - often broken - logic from zero. Juggling three projects in parallel fragmentizes mental context like a 90s hard drive. After a few hours, more energy goes into task switching and hallucination hunting than actual engineering. Deep work has been replaced by high-speed bot micromanagement

ChrisArchitect• 5 months ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945755

jfkdfiefj• 5 months ago

Against all odds this asshats tone remains optimistic and deferent.

Worth every penny.

gcanyon• 5 months ago

This has been going on in technology for decades.

   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.

This applies across (almost?) everything: club newsletters that used to take half a day to write out by hand later took half a day to type and lay out with some clip art. It still takes a year or more to make a movie, but now we get Avatar instead of Ice Pirates -- look it up! :-)

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.

AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it

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