AI promised less work. I've never worked more
oioannou.com646 points by oorestisime a day ago
646 points by oorestisime a day ago
This resonates 100% with me. I am tired too.
This is what I think is the solution - I've tried it a few times with good results.
1. We need our own project or task plan. A simple forward-thinking TODO list is good enough. This needs to be prepared before the day begins. Daily.
2. Focus and limit scope. Focusing on doing ONLY what's on the list is the discipline I (we) lack and which we need badly.
3. Side quests are killing us. Allowing ourselves to veer off the planned daily tasks should require a complete away-from-the-keyboard planning session with pen and paper. Print it out but plan it away from the LLM. Use the LLM to summarise the problem, by all means, but do the thinking away from the LLM. The current TODO list needs to be the main input of such a deliberation. The output is the new TODO list. The objective of this away-from-keyboard exercise is simply to maintain control of the next steps.
On days where I worked with my TODO lists, I clocked out and joined the family for activities, slept sooner and better. On days I lost control of that list, the exhaustion mounted almost on the same day.
Make a finite list for the day, tick it off and go spend time with the missus, the kids or the dog. 2c.
Agreed. We're still bottlenecked when it comes to feature work because we need to think of the ideas, user test, talk with stakeholders etc. But somehow inventing loads of tasks to feel busy anyways. Those tasks are the side quests, things we normally wouldn't take on. It feels great to finally squash that bug or do that rewrite. But you're adding stuff onto everyone else's plate as well. Discussions, reviews etc, a constant barrage of new things to consider.
I wish my colleagues respected todo lists. Must be nice to just be able to get though a day without constant interruptions. ::sad face::
I like this and then I also timeblock so I write out manually on paper every 30 minute increment, and then as the day goes you mark what you did in the previous 30 minute block. Doesn't need to be perfect but it kind of anchors you when at a desk and then it's interesting to look back at the end of the day and see how productive or unproductive you were.
Good strat.
We can also just ditch the AI. It is more trouble then it’s worth.
You can. I work for myself, and I’d never go back to the pre-AI times voluntarily. I have superpowers now.
I work for myself, and I’d never use AI voluntarily. I mean, have you read the article in question?
I don’t see why I need to subject myself to burnout when I don’t have someone pushing me for higher productivity metrics. I enjoy thinking things through, planning, programming the bloody thing.
In all honestly, if I had to, I’d rather take drugs to be more productive than juggling a dozen agents. Being an overworked manager is no superpower.
This will never happen as too much money has been invested in it. I can't recall the last time so much money has been pumped.
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.
Aluminum used to be more expensive than platinum. Now we crumple it up and throw it in the bin. AI has done the same thing to the cost of a line of code.
> Aluminum used to be more expensive than platinum. Now we crumple it up and throw it in the bin. AI has done the same thing to the cost of a line of code.
And hopefully it will to that to all labor, so we can finally crumple up the workers and throw them into the bin too!
And those greedy workers shouldn't complain, they should be happy about the change! Now they can have as much of the stuff we throw in the bin as they want!
Aluminum was and is still something we cannot afford to waste.
14 years ago: "The Battle for Raw Materials - A Company on the Hunt for Aluminum" (DE)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rd1Fern6JQ8
few days ago: "Dispute Over Aluminum Scrap: European Industry Calls for Export Restrictions" (DE)
100%.
And a corollary being that without any time spent on the "mundane", almost every single aspect of the work becomes the genuinely consequential decision-making steps.
Which I find exhausting.
I see this directly. I'm an engineer but part of that is doing non-engineer work like making powerpoints, whitepapers, and generic work that's necessary but that I would delegate to someone else if I were high enough on the totem pole.
AI gives me the ability to do that stuff faster so I can focus more on the 20% and the quality of what I'm doing, not the nuance of formatting a document.
AI makes up for a lot of crap tooling, but is often worse than good tooling. In this case "good tooling" would be a document template or formatting language that is easy/fast to use. What I have seen AI do so far if you try to one shot a PowerPoint deck is underwhelming to say the least. (To say more: it looks like a word cannon was used to splatter text on slides with random positions, colors, and fonts.)
Just skip the powerpoint if you can't be bothered to create it. It's painfully obvious for anyone listening that the presenter didn't come up with or think through what they're talking about.
Not always an option if you're being required to make a PowerPoint. The content doesn't need to be AI generated. Just the organization of slides is a PITA and not a good use of my time.
> powerpoints, whitepapers
Khm, ackshually... any documentation work is best not left to LLMs. They are excellent at generating many words with little value. Even sketching a doc and running through an LLM although a bit better than just a prompt "generate docs from this code" still suffers from similar problems. I prefer to write briefly, but doing it myself.
OTOH - formatting and other stuff not related to content, this is great to delegate, even though the results are often mediocre, but I really don't care about that at this point.
> But now you can do that work to an ±80% quality level of the old, manual way, but in 1% of the time.
But what happens when the 20% quality margin that we lost aggregates over different layers of infrastructure and compounds into brokenness and chaos?
Same as the work produced by bad employees. Gets absorbed, fixed, ignored or thrown out.
It’s not like companies never shipped broken shit before AI
I have a completely different perspective on this.
During the day, I am using Opus 5.5 to develop solutions our team would never think was possible two years ago.
Ar night I am watching my 5yo learn how to read and do math. The sense of accomplishment he shows being able to add double digits is contagious.
Nothing is mundane. One man's basic work is another man's magic. When we have appreciation for each other, we advance more as a species.
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.
On the plus side for us worker bees, this is why I never really bought in to the narrative that our jobs were inevitably doomed. A question I've posed a few times: Consider two reasonably similar competitors with 100 engineers two years ago. Suppose AI really does accelerate development 10x times. It doesn't (at least not yet) but the larger number helps bring the question into focus. One company fires 90 engineers and does the same work with the remaining 10. The other company keeps all its engineers and does 10 times the work.
Who wins in the market?
It's not a uniform answer. There are times and places where the first one wins, as well as a mixed strategy. But I think broadly speaking the majority answer is the second.
>On the plus side for us worker bees, this is why I never really bought in to the narrative that our jobs were inevitably doomed. A question I've posed a few times: Consider two reasonably similar competitors with 100 engineers two years ago. Suppose AI really does accelerate development 10x times. It doesn't (at least not yet) but the larger number helps bring the question into focus. One company fires 90 engineers and does the same work with the remaining 10. The other company keeps all its engineers and does 10 times the work. Who wins in the market?
The one who understands that "10 times the work" is not necessarily absorbable by the market, and adjust to whatever lesser value still works, and still fires a lot of the 100.
A lot of the fired then make a Discord and casually replicate the company's product.
That's how it will eventually pan out, but I guess the company gets a bag before the collapse.
>A lot of the fired then make a Discord and casually replicate the company's product.
And they find out replicating the product means little, it's the customer base, industry reputations, connections, support, ecosystem, and stuff, that matter.
Companies that conduct these layoffs don't just lay off developers. The tend to also lay off support, sales, legal, etc... Especially support, a chatbot is all you need right?
And that's how that "layoff Discord" can produce something that can matter to customers. It will be a smaller company, and small companies have a serious advantage when it comes to support: you can get an actual human, maybe even the main dev, he can actually do things rather than transferring you from chatbot to bureaucracy. It doesn't scale, but it may be enough to get a competitor started.
As for connections, you may have inadvertently let go of the guy who has the connections. And you may have fired a perfectly functional team, ready for from clever entrepreneur with connections (who may be one of the fired) to pick up. It is so much of a recognized problem that some big companies hire people just so that their competitors can't have them.
> some big companies hire people just so that their competitors can't have them.
True. Also true that this was ZIRP phenomenon predominantly in big tech. And once mass layoffs started in big tech most of those ultra elite engineers/staff either retired or took job at lower pay instead of launching competitors to big tech.
Who is going to fund these smaller companies? Why do you think this isn't happening right now as we speak? Where are these companies made from these layoff discords in the past two or so years?
What makes you think it is not happening right now? Startups have to come from somewhere, and they don't have to say how they got together, in fact, it would be smart for them to keep that "layoff discord" hidden if it can keep the lawyers attention away.
And we here stories of "guy left big company to make his own startup" all the times. It is a common story for indie video game devs for instance.