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AI Doesn't Reduce Work–It Intensifies It

• hlynurd 8mo ago
  The title alone maximizes the word-to-LLMism ratio
• energy123 8mo ago
  > In an eight-month study Things have improved significantly since then. Copying and pasting code from o1/o3 versus letting codex 5.3 xhigh assemble its own context and do it for you.
  • hennell 8mo ago
    Since when? You're quoting the timeframe not the period under study. It's also not a study of just engineers, it's people across engineering, product, design, research, and operations. For a lot of none-code tasks Ai needs pasted context as it's not usually in a repo like code is. (And their comments about intensifying engineering workload also aren't really changed by ai copy/paste vs context).
  • coffeefirst 8mo ago
    At some point, the “but everything has radically changed in the past 15 minutes” counterargument to all material evidence that undermines AI marketing has to become boring and unpersuasive. I humbly propose that point is today.
    • linsomniac 8mo ago
      >I humbly propose that point is today. You're right that the argument will become boring, but I think it's gonna be a minute before it does so. I spent much of yesterday playing with the new "agent teams" experimental function of Claude Code, and it's pretty remarkable. It one-shotted a rather complex Ansible module (including packaging for release to galaxy), and built a game that teaches stock options learning, both basically one-shotted. On Thursday I had a FAC with a coworker and he predicted 2026 is going to be the year of acceleration, and based on what I've seen over the last 2-3 years I'd say it's hard to argue that.
    • Uehreka 8mo ago
      Last night I tried out Opus 4.6 on a personal project involving animating in Gaussian Splats where the final result is output as a video. In the past, AI coding agents could usually reason about the code well enough that they had a good chance of success, but I’d have to manually test since they were bad at “seeing” the output and characterizing it in a way that allowed them to debug if things went wrong, and they would never ever check visual outputs unless I forced them to (probably because it didn’t work well during RL training). Opus 4.6 correctly reasoned (on its own, I didn’t even think to prompt this) that it could “test” the output by grabbing the first, middle and last frame, and observing that the first frame should be empty, the middle frame half full of details, and the final frame resembling the input image. That alone wouldn’t have impressed me that much, but it actually found and fixed a bug based on visual observation of a blurry final frame (we hadn’t run the NeRF training for enough iterations). In a sense this is an incremental improvement in the model’s capabilities. But in terms of what I can now use this model for, it’s huge. Previous models struggled at tokenizing/interpreting images beyond describing the contents in semantic terms, so they couldn’t iterate based on visual feedback when the contents were abstract or broken in an unusual way. The fact that they can do this now means I can set them on tasks like this unaided and have a reasonable probability that they’ll be able to troubleshoot their own issues. I understand your exhaustion at all the breathless enthusiasm, but every new models radically changes the game for another subset of users/tasks. You’re going to keep hearing that counterargument for a long time, and the worst part is, it’s going to be true even if it’s annoying.
      • zozbot234 8mo ago
        Not surprising, since being able to "see" images effectively is key to unblocking LLM augmentation for use in web and app frontend work.
• bunderbunder 8mo ago
  When you’re sailing, juat going as fast as possible won’t necessarily get you where you need to go. Not just won’t get you there fastest. At all.
  • larodi 8mo ago
    it intensifies work, and shortens time to burnout, which... like nobody still talks of. ingesting these huge slops of information can be super tiring.
    • baal80spam 8mo ago
      > it intensifies work, and shortens time to burnout This is most likely correct. Everyone talks how AI makes it possible to "do multiple tasks at the same time", but noone seems to care that the cognitive (over)load is very real.
      • menaerus 8mo ago
        IME you don't even have to do multiple things at the same time to reach that cognitive fatigue. The pace alone, which is now much higher, could be enough to saturate your cognitive capabilities.
        • bunderbunder 8mo ago
          For me one unexpected factor is how much it strains my executive function to try and maintain attention on the task at hand while I’m letting the agent spin away for 5-10 minutes at a stretch. It’s even worse than the bad old days of long compile times because at least then I could work on tests or something like that while I wait. But with coding agents I feel like I need to be completely hands off because they might decide to touch literally any file in the repository. It reminds me a bit of how à while back people were finding that operating a level 3 autonomous vehicle is actually more fatiguing than driving a vehicle that doesn’t even have cruise control.
          • 8mo ago
• btbuildem 8mo ago
  I think the article nails it, on multiple counts. From personal experience, the cognitive overload is sneaky, but real. You do end up taking on more than you can handle, just because your mob of agents can do the minutia of the tasks, doesn't free you from comprehending, evaluating and managing the work. It's intense.
  • varispeed 8mo ago
    "Explain to me like I am five what you just did" Then "Make a detailed list of changes and reasoning behind it." Then feed that to another AI and ask: "Does it make sense and why?"
    • coldtea 8mo ago
      Then get rid of. They can keep 1/10 the humans, and have them run such agents.
    • salawat 8mo ago
      Garbage In, Garbage Out. If you're working under the illusion any tool relieves you from the burden of understanding wtf it is you're doing, you aren't using it safely, and you will offload the burden of your lack of care on someone else down the line. Don't. Ever. Do. That.
  • wnolens 8mo ago
    This has been my experience too. I feel freed up from the "manual labor" slice of software development and can focus on more interesting design problems and product alignment, which feels like a bit of a drug right now that i'm actually working harder and more hours.
  • Tade0 8mo ago
    Started referring to it as "speed of accountability". A responsible developer will only produce code as fast as they can sign it off. An irresponsible one will just shit all over the codebase.
  • Molitor5901 8mo ago
• autoconfig 8mo ago
  "It never gets easier, you just go faster" - Greg LeMond
  • criddell 8mo ago
    That quotation pops up on cycling subreddits occasionally and I've always disliked it because I think it discourages people from casual bike riding. I've been biking to work occasionally for a few years now and it definitely gets easier.
    • gbjw 8mo ago
      Yeah the quote assumes you're riding without speed limits. In a typical commute, it does get easier once your cardiovascular ability exceeds the upper speed limit given the route.
      • criddell 8mo ago
        No, the quote assumes you want to go faster. I don't really. I enjoy my ride and if I wanted to get to work 5 minutes faster, I would leave 5 minutes earlier.
    • matwood 8mo ago
      I read that quote as speaking more to the human condition and less about cycling. Humanity has a tendency to keep pushing to the edge of its current abilities no matter how much they expand.
  • almost_usual 8mo ago
    Only if you continue to push yourself while training. What used to be difficult absolutely gets easier in endurance after training.
• gk1 8mo ago
  Exactly as happened with computer revolution... Expectations raised in line with productivity. In HN parlance, being a 10x engineer just becomes "being an engineer," and "100x engineer" is the new 10x engineer. And from what I can see in myself and others right now, being a 100x of anything, while exhilarating, is also mentally and physically taxing.
  • c-linkage 8mo ago
    Being a 100x developer means you can work just 1% of the time you used to work, right?
    • gk1 8mo ago
      Think of some 100x folks you know of. Are they working more or less than before?
      • wiseowise 8mo ago
        They sure as hell don’t make 100x more. Maybe from ads they serve selling AI/productivity snake oil.
      • jplusequalt 8mo ago
        >Think of some 100x folks you know of. This mythical class of developer doesn't exist. Are you trying to tell me that there are a class of developers out there that are doing three months worth of work every single day at the office?
        • pixl97 8mo ago
          It's odd that kind of developer doesn't exist, but that type of CEO does. Maybe we need to replace CEOs with AI.
    • javcasas 8mo ago
      When the expectation is 100x, then it is work 100% of the time at maximum speed.
• tsunamifury 8mo ago
  In the Ford matrix of smart to dumb and hardworking to lazy AI will enable the dumb and hard working to 100x their damage to a company over night.
  • sph 8mo ago
    Can’t miss the opportunity to share my favourite aphorism: “ I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage.” — Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord
• grey-area 8mo ago
  Delete the llmism after the dash and the title is correct.
• micromacrofoot 8mo ago
  Same with most productivity gains in tooling historically, I think one way we should consider reckoning with this is through workers rights. The industrial revolution lead to gains that allowed for weekends and the elimination of child labor, but they didn't come for free, they had to be fought for. If we don't fight for it, what are we gaining? more intense work in exchange for what?
• hansonkd 8mo ago
  I've been saying this for the past 2 years. Even think about the stereotypical "996" work schedule that is all the rave in SF and AI founder communities. It just takes thinking about it for 5 seconds to see the contradiction. If AI was so good at reducing work, why is it every company engaging with AI has their workload increase. 20 years ago SV was stereotyped for "lazy" or fun loving engineers who barely worked but cashed huge pay checks. Now I would say the stereotype is overworked engineers who on the midlevel are making less than 20 back. I see it across other disciplines too. Everyone I know from sales, to lawyers, etc if they engage with AI its like they get stuck in a loop where the original task is easier but now it revealed 10 more smaller tasks that fill up their time even more so than before AI. Thats not to say productivity gains with AI aren't found. It just seems like the gains get people into a flywheel of increasing work.
  • seanmcdirmid 8mo ago
    996 is a Chinese term, not American. There is a lot of work to do, just because you are doing more work with your time doesn’t mean you can somehow count that as less work.
    • Bullfight2Cond 8mo ago
      china outlawed it
      • thenthenthen 8mo ago
        What? 007 is the norm here now.
    • hansonkd 8mo ago
      I've only seen it in job postings and linkedin posts from SF founders.
      • seanmcdirmid 8mo ago
        I'm not sure if you are serious, but 996 was invented by the Chinese tech industry in 2019 and I've never heard it to describe anything in the USA (well, until today). Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system Note all the examples are also Chinese. There is a recent edit at the bottom of the page though: Occurrence in US tech companies In 2025, amidst the AI boom, reports have emerged of startup tech companies in San Francisco / Silicon Valley requiring "9-9-6" work schedules, with the goal of building things quickly in a competitive market.[15][16][17] California Labor Code §515.5 exempts employers from providing many software engineers with overtime pay.
• asdev 8mo ago
  The cognitive overload is more so people not understanding the slop they are generating. Slop piles on top of slop until a situation arrives where you actually need to understand everything, and you don’t because you didn’t do the work yourself.
• bryanlarsen 8mo ago
  I've started calling it "revenge of the QA/Support engineers", personally. Our QA & Support engineers have now started creating MR's to fix customer issues, satisfy customer requests and fix bugs. They're AI sloppy and a bunch of work to fix up, but they're a way better description of the problem than the tickets they used to send. So now instead of me creating a whole bunch of work for QA/Support engineers when I ship sub-optimal code to them, they're creating a bunch of work for me by shipping sub-optimal code to me.
  • skybrian 8mo ago
    I wonder how well a coding agent would do if you asked one to review the change and then to rewrite the merge request to fix the things it criticized?
    • bryanlarsen 8mo ago
      It does quite well and definitely catches/fixes things I miss. But I still catch significant things it misses. And I am using AI to fix the things I catch. Which is then more slop I have to review. Our product is not SaaS, it's software installed on customer computers. Any bug that slips through is really expensive to fix. Careful review and code construction is worth the effort.
      • imiric 8mo ago
        Jesus Christ.
• yerik 8mo ago
  I've noticed first hand how the scope of responsibilities is broadened by integrating AI on workflows. Personally if feels like a positive feedback loop: I take more responsibilities; since they are outside my scope I have a harder time reviewing AI output; this increases fatigue and makes me more prone to just accepting more AI output; with the increase in reliance on AI output I get to a point where I'm managing things that are way outside my scope and I can't do it unless I rely on AI entirely. In my opinion this also increases Imposter Syndrome effects. But I doubt companies and management will think for a second that this voluntary increase in "productivity" is any bad, and it will probably be encouraged
  • pixl97 8mo ago
    I mean this has been occurring for years/decades now. Have 10 people on staff. Fire 5. The remaining 5 have to do all the duties or get fired, for the same pay.
• neversupervised 8mo ago
  HBR is analyzing this with an old world lens. It might very well be that the effects are as they say temporarily. But the reason this is happening is because AI is in fact replacing human labor and the puppeteers are trying to remain employed. The steady state outcome is human replacement, which means AI does in fact reduce human labor, even if the remaining humans in the loop are more overloaded. The equation is not workload per capita but how many humans it takes to accomplish a goal.
  • simonw 8mo ago
    If AI was indeed replacing human labor I would expect HBR to be among the first publications to cover it.
    • falcor84 8mo ago
      Why? I don't recall HBR ever being at forefront of a change. It seems to me that they're just good at identifying a change when it's already widespread and giving it a catchy name, and an explanatory model that they themselves can debunk in a future issue.
    • lackerloser 8mo ago
      [dead]
• ChrisArchitect 8mo ago
  Related: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46939593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46939593
• ishtanbul 8mo ago
  This is jevons paradox at its purest. Who really thought companies were just going to let everyone go home earlier? Work is easier, now you will do even more. Congratulations.
  • stuaxo 8mo ago
    Feels like there may be a gap in the market for businesses that do this though, since keeping everyone at work leads to burn out and isn't an edge. Having well rested employees that don't burn out is though.
    • pixl97 8mo ago
      The capital class wants you naked and afraid. If you're well rested you might have thoughts like "Why am I working for this guy, why don't I become a competitor". Instead them going "Shit, I need to work 5 more hours though I've already worked 8 today so I can keep my health insurance" is far more beneficial for them controlling everything.
  • tkel 8mo ago
    It's also a question of class, fundamental to the structure of capitalism. This is the same problem ALL technological progress goes through in capitalism. Workers are not the ones in control of the organizations. Capitalists, the owners, control the organization. So if new technology makes the organization as a whole more efficient, capitalists control how the efficiency gains are distributed. Technological progress should be a good thing, liberating us from work as we become more productive, reducing working hours and increasing pay and free time. But under capitalist owners, it becomes myopic and detrimental to workers, used to squeeze out more work and revenue like you said. If workers were in control of the organizations in which they work, technological progress would be deployed as the vast majority of people wanted.
• xXSLAYERXx 8mo ago
  > On their own initiative workers did more because AI made “doing more” feel possible, accessible, and in many cases intrinsically rewarding. Love this quote. For me, barely a few weeks in, I feel exactly this. To clarify - I feel this only when working on dusty old side projects. When I use it to build for the org its still a slog just faster.
• nihzm 8mo ago
  This article is scratching the surface of the concept of desynchronization from the theory of social acceleration and the sociology of speed. Any technology that is supposed to create idle time, once it reaches mass adoptions has the opposite effect of speeding up everything else. We have been on this track for a long time: cars were supposed to save time in transit, but people started living farther from city centres (c.f. Marchetti's constant). E-Mail and instant messaging were supposed to eliminate wait time from postal services, but we now send orders of magnitude more messages and social norms have shifted such that faster replies are expected. "AI" backed productivity increases are only impressive relative to non-AI users. The idilliac dream of working one or two days a week with agents in the background "doing the rest" is delusional. Like all previous technologies once it reaches mass adoption everyone will be working at a faster pace, because our society is obsessed with speed.
  • leoedin 8mo ago
    If anyone is saying "yeah, but this time will be different", just look at our society now. Arguably the only jobs which are necessary in society are related to food, heating, shelter and maybe some healthcare. Everything else - what most people are doing - is just feeding the never ending treadmill of consumer desire and bureaucratic expansion. If everyone adjusted their desired living standards and possessions to those of just a few centuries ago, almost all of us wouldn't need to work. Yet here we are, still on the treadmill! It's pretty clear that making certain types of work no longer needed will just create new demands and wants, and new types of work for us to do. That appears to be human nature.
  • simianwords 8mo ago
    You are wrong. Cars have made it possible for people to commute way more easily than the alternative where cars don’t exist. Cars allowed people to live far away which allows for lower housing cost therefore decreased overall cost of living.
    • maest 8mo ago
      Before posting such a daring response, I suggest you use your favourite search engine and read up on the following topics: Red Queen Race, Jevons Paradox, Induced Demand, Technology Treadmill.
• coldtea 8mo ago
  Every other advancement in office productivity and software has intensified work. AI will too. It will also further commodify it.
• stuaxo 8mo ago
  The only sustainable thing to do is to reduce peoples work hours, but keep paying them to the same over the week. If before AI we were talking about 6 hours days as an aim, we should be talking about a 4 hour work day, without any reduction in pay. Otherwise everyone is going to burn out.
  • wiseowise 8mo ago
    “lol” - Average manager
• alexpotato 8mo ago
  My dad was a stockbroker in the 1970s and he had a great line: “When computers first came out we were told: ‘Computers will be so productive and save you so much time you won’t know what to do with all of your free time!’ Unsurprisingly, that didn’t happen.” Aka Jevon’s Paradox in practice
  • bonesss 8mo ago
    The Mythical Man Month was published in 75, with a deep technical insiders perspective. The kinds of productivity scaling they had been seeing to that point could be reasonably extrapolated to all kinds of industrial re-alignment. Then we ran out of silver bullets. [Still waiting to see what percentage of LLM hype is driven by people not having read The Mythical Man Month.]
  • pixl97 8mo ago
    This would be true without competition. What really happens is everybody adopts the same strategy and raises the work floor while demanding more. Until we get rid of unlimited greed in humans we shouldn't expect a change.
• plainspeech 8mo ago
  AI speeds things up at the beginning. It helps you get unstuck, find answers quickly without jumping through different solutions from internet, write boilerplate, explore ideas faster. But over time I reach for it faster than I probably should. Instead of digging into basic code, I directly jump to AI. I’ve been using it for even basic code searches. AI just makes it easier to outsource thinking. And your understanding of the codebase can get thinner over time.
  • danielbln 8mo ago
    How is basic code search "thinking". This is not a skill I need to keep around, it used to be a means to an end and now it's a vestige.
• vagrantstreet 8mo ago
  How about using LLM's to improve developer experience instead? I've had a lot of failures with "AI" even on small projects, even the best things I've tried like (agentic-project-management) I still had to just go back to traditional coding. Not sure if everyone shares this sentiment but the reason I use AI as a crutch is due to poor documentation that's out there, even simple terminal commands don't show use examples for ls when you try to type man ls. I just end up putting up with the code output because it works ok enough for short term, this however doesn't seem like a sustainable plan long term either. There is also this dread I feel because what I would do if AI went down permanently? The tools I tried like Zeal really didn't do it for me either for documentation, not sure who decided on the documentation format but this "Made by professionals, for professionals" isn't really cutting it anymore. Apologies in advance if I missed out on any tools but in my 4+ years of university nobody ever mentioned any quality tools either, and I'm sure this trend is happening everywhere.
• __MatrixMan__ 8mo ago
  I'm not sure if intensifies is the word. AI just has awkward time dynamics that people are adapting to. Sometimes you end up with tasks that are low intensity long duration. Like I need to supervise this AI over the course of three hours, but the task is simple enough that I can watch a movie while I do it. So people measuring my work time are like "wow he's working extra hours" but all I did during that time is press enter 50 times and write 3 sentences.
• czhu12 8mo ago
  It's totally expected because the bar goes way up. There used to be a time when hosting a dynamic website with borderline default HTML components was difficult enough that companies spent hundreds of thousands of dollars. These days, a single person's side project is infinitely more complex.
• keeda 8mo ago
  I think there is another dynamic that this article hints at but does not call out explicitly: work becoming much more intense because AI is now doing most of the cognitively less intense -- maybe even relaxing -- "donkey work." This means humans are now spending most of their time doing the much more intense problem-solving work, followed by the dopamine hit of seeing their work completed. The cognitive buffer of that lengthy, intermediate donkey work is gone. I posted more about it in this comment yesterday on the thread about AI fatigue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46938038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46938038 People are now working at a much more intense cadence, which will inevitably lead to burnout unless work is managed to be more sustainable.
• gleipnircode 8mo ago
  As a solo developer working in enterprise systems (ABAP — yes, that's still a thing and yes, it looks the same as 20 years ago), AI tools didn't intensify my work — they unlocked work I couldn't do before. Even within ABAP, Claude handles the stuff nobody wants to touch. Recursive methods that cost me sleepless nights, test drivers that everyone agrees are important but nobody actually wants to write. That alone is huge. But the real game changer? It gave me the possibility to build things outside my usual stack that I never would have attempted alone. The limit used to be time and team size. Now it feels like the only limit is imagination.
  • zerd 8mo ago
    Sounds similar to these quotes from the article: > we found that employees worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day, often without being asked to do so. > On their own initiative workers did more because AI made “doing more” feel possible, accessible, and in many cases intrinsically rewarding.
• r87i 8mo ago
  [dead]