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AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it
Original article: https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies-it https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies...
- erelong 8mo agoDoesn't have to be that way, it's about managers being realistic and not pushing people too far
- Pingk 8mo agoYou 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.
- wiseowise 8mo agoManagers 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_3 8mo agoDon't worry about these people. These are internet cult victims.
- bilekas 8mo 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.
- fhd2 8mo agoWhat 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 8mo agoAnd 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%.
- bilekas 8mo agoThat's an interesting business model actually : "Oh hey there, I see you're almost finished your project and ready to launch, watch theses adverts and participate in this survey to get the last 10% of your app completed"
- simondoubleu 8mo ago[dead]
- CSSer 8mo agoDo 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.
- fhd2 8mo agoYeah the latter. Doesn't happen much with super obvious stuff, but especially when I'm a bit fuzzy on requirements, it can be just endless iterations.
- fhd2 8mo agoI 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.
- rvz 8mo agoIf 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 8mo 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.
- embedding-shape 8mo ago> You build something to begin to discover the correct requirements and to picture the real problem domain in question. That's one way, another way is to keep the idea in your head (both actively and "in the background) for days/weeks, and then eventually you sit down and write a document, and you'll get 99% of the requirements down perfectly. Then implementation can start. Personally I prefer this hammock-style development and to me it seems better at building software that makes sense and solves real problems. Meanwhile "build something to discover" usually is best when you're working with people who need to be able to see something to believe there is progress, but the results are often worse and less well-thought out.
- maininformer 8mo agoI 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_3 8mo agoIsn'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
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- mrtksn 8mo agoComputer 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 8mo agoI 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.
- mrtksn 8mo agoLLMs 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.
- co_king_3 8mo 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. What domains do you work in? This description does not match my experience whatsoever.
- rvz 8mo agoMaybe 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-it https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- wiseowise 8mo agoIt is in the title if you open the page.
- singularfutur 8mo agoThis 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.
- ap99 8mo agoThis 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 8mo agoMaybe society shouldnt be optimising for that.
- falloutx 8mo 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.
- co_king_3 8mo agoLabor organizing is (obviously) banned on HackerNews. This isn't the place to kvetch about this; you will literally never see a unionization effort on this website because the accounts of the people posting about it will be [flagged] and shadowbanned.
- localhoster 8mo agoTBH, 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 8mo agoIf 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.
- rtrav 8mo agoApart from the addicts, AI also helps the liars, marketeers and bloggers. You can outsource the lies to the AI.
- ap99 8mo agoYeah 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_3 8mo agoIf you use an LLM you've given up your edge.
- 9875325996435 8mo agoIf you use a compiler you've given up your edge.
- wiseowise 8mo 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 8mo agoThere's a word for that mindset: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karoshi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karoshi
- yieldcrv 8mo agothis 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
- wiseowise 8mo agoHopefully 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.
- yieldcrv 8mo agoI 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
- wiseowise 8mo agoI’ll never get “I wish I could control it from y phone” types, or “I’ve been working while walking my dog, amazing”. Why would you want to subject yourself to work outside of working hours? The beauty of work laptop is that either I work or I don’t. Laptop open - work time, laptop closed - goodbye, see you on Monday.
- yieldcrv 8mo agoIt won't be for a work laptop, does that make it easier to understand?
- co_king_3 8mo agoFrankly, it seems more like the Crack epidemic to me.
- FrankBooth 8mo ago
- everdrive 8mo agoPeople 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?
- zozbot234 8mo agoDiscussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945755
- captainmuon 8mo agoIt'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.
- falloutx 8mo agoI 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 8mo ago> percentage of good, well planned, consistent and coherent software is going to approach zero So everything stays exactly the same?
- Chance-Device 8mo agoUnderrated 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.
- oblio 8mo agoValidation was always the hard part, outside of truly novel areas - think edges of computer science (which generally happen very rarely and only need to be explored once or a handful of times). Validation was always the hard part because great validation requires great design. You can't validate garbage.
- falloutx 8mo agoI 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.
- 8mo ago
- bsenftner 8mo agoI'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.
- rtrav 8mo agoSurely 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.
- bsenftner 8mo agoDon'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.
- falloutx 8mo agoThis 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 8mo 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 8mo agoMy 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 8mo 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 8mo agoI'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_3 8mo agoI'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.
- aetherspawn 8mo agoYes, 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.
- camgunz 8mo agoComments on the original article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945755
- Noaidi 8mo ago40 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 8mo agointensification = productivity for me.
- Xarovin 8mo agoI 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.
- Flavius 8mo agoThis 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.
- zozbot234 8mo agoThe 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_3 8mo agoI'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.
- Flavius 8mo agoThat’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.
- co_king_3 8mo agoStart a union or stop complaining
- digikata 8mo agoA 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.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- sprightlytogo 8mo agoAs 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.
- latexr 8mo 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 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.
- wolfcola 8mo agoedited: quote misattributed
- ttoinou 8mo agoIt’s called the market. If you can compete while providing better life balance, go ahead and compete with those bad companies
- FeteCommuniste 8mo agoIt's called the market. If you can compete while not employing eight year olds on your assembly lines and dumping carcinogens in the river, go ahead and compete with those bad companies.
- ttoinou 8mo agoWe had it good as software developers. Now, we can't be just code monkeys anymore.. Don't be mad. It's just the way it works.
- 8mo ago
- teekert 8mo agoHad 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...
- fendy3002 8mo agoNow that you get accustomed with Hugo, I wonder if the way you plan & prompting now will produce better result or not
- teekert 8mo agoI 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.
- fendy3002 8mo agothought so. I find that too much vibe coding (less spec) will make the AI perform worse, even with 4.6 opus. Pseudocode is obviously the best they perform, having a good lower-level specs usually provide a good result too.
- cpursley 8mo agoIt 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 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.
- apexalpha 8mo agoI 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.
- dubeye 8mo agoTell that to my family with whom I have been spending a lot more time recently having benefited a lot from increased productivity.
- metaltyphoon 8mo agoIf 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.
- dubeye 8mo agoThat's not likely to be the fault of AI, that's probably a managerial issue or a personal discipline issue.
- Klaster_1 8mo agoNot 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 8mo agoSame. It's freed up hours to spend with the kids. Time is scarce
- jillesvangurp 8mo agoThat'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.
- FeteCommuniste 8mo 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.
- jillesvangurp 8mo agoChange 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.
- sph 8mo agoIs a blog reposting other content worth its own post? Previous discussion of the original article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945755
- arealaccount 8mo agoKinda tangental, but the headline gave me a laugh, even has the emdash
- aetherspawn 8mo agoI’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.
- cube00 8mo agoIt 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 8mo agoIt does reduce some work. Obvious examples would be copy-writing and fashion modelling.
- HungrMn 8mo ago[dead]
- nwhnwh 8mo agoAn 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?
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- incomingpain 8mo agoAI 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 8mo agoProductivity 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.
- tzury 8mo agoI 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.
- simonw 8mo ago> Show me what you shipped with it that isn’t about AI. From this weekend: https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-history-json https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-history-json and https://github.com/datasette/datasette-sqlite-history-json https://github.com/datasette/datasette-sqlite-history-json
- uyhsadf 8mo ago[flagged]
- simondoubleu 8mo ago[dead]
- tzury 8mo agoImpressive indeed. Was not aware. The comments below all flagged.
- uyhsadf 8mo ago[flagged]
- JohnCClarke 8mo agoWhen 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.
- simondoubleu 8mo ago[dead]
- devinprater 8mo agoOver 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.
- rimonbubbledew 8mo ago[dead]
- veunes 8mo agoValidation 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 8mo ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945755
- jfkdfiefj 8mo agoAgainst all odds this asshats tone remains optimistic and deferent. Worth every penny.
- gcanyon 8mo agoThis 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.