5 ms·
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 ju
by 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 ago996 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 agochina outlawed it
- thenthenthen 8mo agoWhat? 007 is the norm here now.
- hansonkd 8mo agoI've only seen it in job postings and linkedin posts from SF founders.
- seanmcdirmid 8mo agoI'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.
- camgunz 8mo agoJuly 2025: https://www.wired.com/story/silicon-valley-china-996-work-schedule/ https://www.wired.com/story/silicon-valley-china-996-work-sc...
- DaedalusII 8mo agonow everyone gets to be a manager !
- kibwen 8mo agoTalking about "productivity" is a red herring. Are the people leveraging LLMs making more money while working the same number of hours? Are the people leveraging LLMs working fewer hours while making the same amount of money? If neither of these are true, then LLMs have not made your life better as a working programmer.
- coldtea 8mo ago>Are the people leveraging LLMs making more money while working the same number of hours? Nobody is getting a raise for using AI. So no. >Are the people leveraging LLMs working fewer hours while making the same amount of money? Early adopters maybe, as they offload some work to agents. As AI commodifies and is the baseline, that will invert, especially as companies shed people to have the remaining "multiply" their output with AI. So the answer will be no and no.
- Spivak 8mo agoWell they don't call it being a wage slave for nothing. You aren't getting a raise because you're still selling the same 40-60 hours of your time. If the business is getting productivity wins they'll buy less time via layoffs. (USSR National Anthem plays) But if you owned the means of production and kept the fruits of your labor, say as a founder or as a sole proprietor side hustle, then it's possible those productivity gains do translate into real time gains on your part.
- nico_h 8mo agoWhat about coops? Or partnerships?
- _DeadFred_ 8mo agoThe very reason why we object to state ownership, that it puts a stop to individual initiative and to the healthy development of personal responsibility, is the reason why we object to an unsupervised, unchecked monopolistic control in private hands. We urge control and supervision by the nation as an antidote to the movement for state socialism. Those who advocate total lack of regulation, those who advocate lawlessness in the business world, themselves give the strongest impulse to what I believe would be the deadening movement toward unadulterated state socialism. --Theodore Roosevelt
- bschwindHN 8mo agoSame story with hardware and software. Hardware gets more efficient and faster, so software devs shove more CPU intensive stuff into their applications, or just go lazy and write inefficient code. The software experience is always going to feel about the same speed perceptually, and employers will expect you to work the same amount (or more!)
- throwawaysleep 8mo ago> If AI was so good at reducing work, why is it every company engaging with AI has their workload increase. Throughout human history, we have chosen more work over keeping output stable.
- coldtea 8mo agoThroughout human history we were never given the choice. We were forced into it like cattle.
- whaleidk 8mo agoSee a lot of people on this site doing it willingly. I think a lot of people will always choose perceived convenience over anything
- Ygg2 8mo agoYou are correct; however, it should be noted that even the top 1% overworks themselves to some extent (e.g. American CEOs work on average 63h per week). They do it for a different reason, though.
- alex43578 8mo agoYou could always choose to work less, but would have less as a result. These days, that choice is more viable than ever, as the basic level of living supported by even a few hours a week of minimum wage affords you luxuries unimaginable 50 or 100 years ago.
- aiven 8mo agothe system is built in a way that you need to run in order to stay still. you cant just "work less" because you will not have stability this way. new slaves using new shiny tools will work more and more and outcompete you in whatever domain you are working. so you will be forced to work more, to learn more in order just to keep your current lifestyle. without basic morality and gov regulation capitalism would exploit humans like cattle. 996 should be outlawed everywhere
- 8mo ago
- joenot443 8mo agoI don't think it's super complicated. I think that prompting takes generally less mental energy than coding by hand, so on average one can work longer days if they're prompting than if they were coding. I can pretty easily do a 12h day of prompting but I haven't been able to code for 12h straight since I was in college.
- jvanderbot 8mo agoThat's a bingo. Additionally, I can eke out 4 hrs really deep diving nowadays, and have structured my workday around that, delegating low-mental-cost tasks to after that initial dive. Now diving is a low enough mental cost that I can do 8-12hrs of it. It's a bicycle. Truly.
- packetlost 8mo agoWhile I agree with the idea that prompting is easier to get started, is it actually less work. More hours doesn't mean they're equally as productive. More, lower quality hours just makes work:life balance worse with nothing to show for it.
- treetalker 8mo agoIsn’t the grander question why on earth people would tolerate, let alone desire, more hours of work every day? The older I get, the more I see the wisdom in the ancient ideas of reducing desires and being content with what one has. --- Later Addition: The article's essential answer is that workers voluntarily embraced (and therefore tolerated) the longer hours because of the novelty of it all. Reading between the lines, this is likely to cause shifts in expectation (and ultimately culture) — just when the novelty wears off and workers realize they have been duped into increasing their work hours and intensity (which will put an end to the voluntary embracing of those longer hours and intensity). And the dreaded result (for the poor company, won't anyone care about it?!) is cognitive overload, hence worker burnout and turnover, and ultimately reduced work quality and higher HR transaction costs. Therefore, TFA counsels, companies should set norms regarding limited use of generative language models (GLMs, so-called "AI"). I find it unlikely that companies will limit GLM use or set reasonable norms: instead they'll crack the whip! --- Even Later Addition: As an outsider, I find it at once amusing and dystopian to consider the suggestions offered at the end of the piece: in the brutalist, reverse-centaur style, workers are now to be programmed with modifications to their "alignment … reconsider[ation of] assumptions … absor[ption of] information … sequencing … [and] grounding"! The worker is now thought of in terms of the tool, not vice versa.
- skybrian 8mo agoMaybe ask the friendly AI about reducing project scope? But we probably won’t if we’re having too much fun.
- lkbm 8mo agoJevons Paradox applies to labor.
- natnatenathan 8mo agoI think you're missing the point. The folks pushing 996 (and willingly working 996) feel like they are in a land rush, and that AI is going to accelerate their ability "take the most amount of land" No one is optimizing for the "9 to 5" oriented engineer.
- pimlottc 8mo agoI laughed at all the Super Bowl commercials showing frazzled office workers transformed into happy loafers after AI has done all their work for them...
- SkyPuncher 8mo agoI chuckled at the Genspark one while imaging what the internal discussions must have been. Obviously, "take a day off" is not the value prop their selling to buyers (company leadership), but they can't be so on the nose in a public commercial that they scare individual contributors.
- sevensor 8mo agoYeah, why would billionaires sell us something that lets us chill out all day, instead of using it themselves and capturing the value directly? You claim to have a perpetual motion machine and a Star Trek replicator rolled into one, what do you need me for?
- AgentMatt 8mo agoThose ads are not for workers, they're for the employers.
- CuriouslyC 8mo agoAs one of the AI people doing 996(7?) I will at least say I can watch youtube videos/play bass/etc while directing 4-5 agents without much trouble, I have my desktop set up into a terminal grid and I just hover the window I want to talk to and give voice instructions. Since I'm working on stuff I'm into the time passes pleasantly.
- grep_name 8mo agoCan you describe what stack you're using for this?
- CuriouslyC 8mo ago
- SkyPuncher 8mo ago> If AI was so good at reducing work, why is it every company engaging with AI has their workload increase. Heavy machinery replaces shovels. It reduces workload on the shovel holders, However, someone still needs to produce the heavy machinery. Some of these companies are shovel holders, realizing they need to move up stream. Some of these companies are already upstream, racing to bring a product to market. The underlying bet for nearly all of these companies is "If I can replace one workflow with AI, I can repeat that with other workflows and dominate"
- thinkharderdev 8mo agoThere's an old saying among cyclists attributed to Greg Lemond: "It doesn't get easier, you just go faster"
- throwaw12 8mo ago> If AI was so good at reducing work, why is it every company engaging with AI has their workload increase. Isn't it simple? Because of competition, which is increased because of entry barrier is lowered a lot for building new software products. You output a lot, so do your competition.
- asielen 8mo agoI feel this. Since my team has jumped into an AI everything working style, expectations have tripled, stress has tripled and actual productivity has only gone up by maybe 10%. It feels like leadership is putting immense pressure on everyone to prove their investment in AI is worth it and we all feel the pressure to try to show them it is while actually having to work longer hours to do so.
- Maximus9000 8mo agoDid you know your comment was featured in TechCrunch? https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/09/the-first-signs-of-burnout-are-coming-from-the-people-who-embrace-ai-the-most/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/09/the-first-signs-of-burnout...
- bingohbangoh 8mo agoMany people in silicon valley truly Believe that AI will take over everything. Therefore, this is the last chance to get in so you better be working really really hard. There's a palpable desperation that makes this wave different from mobile or cloud. It's not about making things better so much as its about not being left behind. I'm not sure of the reason for this shift. It has a lot of overlap with the grindset culture you see on Twitter where people caution against taking breaks because your (mostly imaginary) competition may catch up with you.
- pllbnk 8mo agoI have seen this written many times and can't shake off this feeling myself; I feel more productive using LLMs but I am not sure I really am. I even feel quite overloaded right now with all the ideas that I could do. In the past I also had many ideas but they were quickly set aside understanding that there's not enough time for everything. Now, it usually starts with prompting and I get into a rabbit hole. In the end, it feels like a lot of words have been exchanged but the results are nowhere to be found.
- tangjurine 8mo agoWhat does 20 back mean?