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Why developers using AI are working longer hours
- decker_dev 8mo ago[dead]
- written-beyond 8mo agoA developers job has always been reviewing and understanding code. Code is literally always the last resort. Unless you're building solutions for other customer, most companies should attempt to minimise the amount of code they have. Because, and I repeat, it's a developers job to understand and review code. More code, more understanding needed, more reviews needed, more problems created.
- whatever1 8mo agoNah summarizing code is now an LLM job as well. There is no place for engineers in the new tech world order.
- grim_io 8mo agoI don't know about you, but if I started doing all that instead of writing code as a priority, I'd be fired. My job is to generate more money, not indulge in code.
- johnfn 8mo agoWas this comment written by an LLM? It seems like it was to me. e.g. the “paradox” is not a paradox at all and is just an obvious statement.
- bluefirebrand 8mo agoI just assume any green account names are LLMs nowadays
- AstroBen 8mo agoFrom looking at their other comments: unquestionably yes it's a bot.
- furyofantares 8mo ago> Software engineering was supposed to be artificial intelligence’s easiest win. At what point in time? Did anyone foresee coding being one of the best and soonest applications of this stuff?
- antonvs 8mo agoThey're probably talking about some point after the capabilities of LLMs started to become clear. It's why Codex, Claude Code, Gemini CLI etc. were developed at all - it was clear that if you wanted a concrete application of LLMs with clear productivity benefits, coding was low-hanging fruit, so all the AI vendors jumped on that and started hyping it.
- whattheheckheck 8mo agoBecause swe was the furthest advanced "collaborative cognition" field in terms of human workflows
- furyofantares 8mo agoSure, but jumping from its amazing these things work for code at all to software engineering is solved is something only grifters or those drunk on the kool-aid did. I do agree that it was thought that these llm-agents would be extremely useful and that is why they were developed, and I happen to believe they in fact are extremely useful (without disagreeing that much of the stuff in the article definitely does happen.) I just sort of resent the setup that it was supposed to be X but actually it failed, when not only is there only minor evidence that it failed, but it was only a brief period in time when it was supposed to be X.
- Copyrightest 8mo ago[dead]
- throwaway314155 8mo agoNo one saw it coming.
- djeastm 8mo ago
- shablulman 8mo ago[flagged]
- SoftTalker 8mo agoNo silver bullet. We've known this since at least the 1980s. The fact that the authors of the code might not be human doesn't change this.
- antonvs 8mo agoI can't deny that this might be a trend in practice, but at companies with reasonably self-aware practices, it isn't, or doesn't need to be. There's this weird thing that happens with new tools where people seem to surrender their autonomy to them, e.g. "welp, I just get pings from [Slack|my phone|etc] all the time, nothing I can do than just be interrupted constantly." More recently, it's "this failed because Claude chose..." No, Claude didn't choose, the person who submitted the PR chose to accept it. It's possible to use tools responsibly and effectively. It's also possible to encourage and mentor employees to do that. The idea that a dev has to be effectively on call because they're pushing AI slop is just wrong on so many levels.
- cejast 8mo ago> More recently, it's "this failed because Claude chose..." No, Claude didn't choose, the person who submitted the PR chose to accept it. I can relate to this, unfortunately these tools are becoming a very convenient way to offload any kind of responsibility when something goes wrong.
- democracy 8mo agoWell if the management want to get more AI, they gonna get more AI, and no, I am not gonna be running around making sure their dreams work smoothly under my human supervision - I am gonna let it go all the way they want. In the mean time I focus on improving my skills.
- fnimick 8mo ago> It's possible to use tools responsibly and effectively. It's also possible to encourage and mentor employees to do that. It's not in the company's interest to stop employees from overworking. Having people overwork for the same pay under pressure is the desired outcome, actually.
- antonvs 8mo agoThere are many companies which don’t operate like this. What you’re describing is the rather uniquely American ultracapitalist perspective. But as an employee, you have a choice to work for a company like that, or work for one that’s run by humans.
- diavelguru 8mo agoThis is a real thing. I spent all of January doing Greenfield development using Claude (I finished the requirements) and all I can say is thank goodness I had the Max 5x plan and not the 20x as I got breaks once the tokens were used up till the next cycle. I was forced to get up and do something else. That something else was biking, rowing, walking. My productivity had never been higher but at what cost? My health no thanks. So I'm glad I'm using the time till token reset for my health. I time it perfectly. I do a walk, row, bike for 1 hour then as I arrive back the tokens are reset. I get like 3 hours nonstop use per token batch with the 5x plan. I've been thinking about going 20x but am scared...
- unshavedyak 8mo agoI don’t get this tbh, I use Claude too and my issue is the opposite - too many small breaks. Every time I hit enter my brain wants to checkout because the agent just spins while it creates thousands of tokens and churns on the subject. Even if it’s only 2m, that’s 2m where my mind has nothing to work on. Hard to stay in flow and engaged. Feels weirdly similar to being interrupted over slack.
- androiddrew 8mo agoI have never been in a flow state with an agent running. I use agents, but that isn’t flow.
- diavelguru 8mo agoand flow state is a luxury in 2026 with AI swarm most likely to be found sparingly if all. Good luck all!
- diavelguru 8mo agoyes agreed. I'm running 3-5 parallel Claude at once with requirements as the input. My prompt is say work on section 5.1 or something very specific. Then I'm monitoring the work across all instances.
- diavelguru 8mo ago
- Fordec 8mo agoSelection bias? The early adopters that are motivated to adopt tools to deliver more, typically also were working more to start with and may have already been struggling with their rate of output?
- aplomb1026 8mo ago[flagged]
- dworks 8mo agothouroughly reviewing and especially testing is faster than skipping manual review and tests
- cpncrunch 8mo agoI'm just curious how much of this AI generated code is reviewed by humans at all, and if that is factored into the productivity gains.
- 0xcafefood 8mo agoIn my experience, code validation (unit testing, code review, manual testing, etc.) was more of a bottleneck than producing code for the most part. This means that faster code generation wouldn't produce significant gains in throughput unless the code validation speeds up too. In my workplace, I've seen evidence that the people showing the biggest productivity gains from AI coding are now shipping enormous commits that are barely getting any validation. Given the Zeitgeist, others are for some reason more lenient towards that than they normally would be (or should be).
- ausbah 8mo agotwo unthought out thoughts: 1. llms allow devs to be more productive, so more free time is seen as opportunity for more work. ppl overshoot and just work more 2. generalized tooling makes devs seem more replaceable putting downward pressure on job security (ie work harder or we’ll get someone who will, oh and for less money) 3. llms allow for more “multitasking” (debatable) via many running background tasks, so more opportunities to “just finish one more thing”
- ptak_dev 8mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- poink 8mo agoPersonally, I make a lot more "out of hour" commits than I used to because I'll batch up low priority tasks throughout the day and let the computer chug on them at night when I'm elsewhere. Commits are coming in at all hours, but I'm not actually looking at them until the next morning.
- rglover 8mo agoI use it every day and I'm taking off weekends for the first time in a decade. It's done wonders for my mental health. I think teams should pay more attention to the value of pumping the brakes vs. incessant redlining. We may actually be able to have a healthy relationship with AI then.
- qzira 8mo agoWhen people talk about AI increasing developer productivity, they usually focus on the coding part. In my experience, the bigger change happens after the code is written. When you move from writing code to supervising agents, your output increases — but your cognitive load increases too. Instead of writing every line yourself, you're now monitoring systems: Did the agent go off-script? Did it retry 50 times while I was asleep? What did that run actually cost? The strange part is that the mental burden doesn't disappear just because the agent is autonomous. In some ways it gets worse, because failures become harder to notice early and harder to contain once they start. It starts to feel less like programming and more like running operations for a team of extremely fast, extremely literal junior developers. Curious if others are seeing the same shift.
- democracy 8mo agoYeah I am not sure many people gonna hang around this - I am not sure I wanna do this role. I like building and delivering and ai is great help but I will not be happy supervising agents, there are better jobs. Unless the money is not to be refused
- qzira 8mo agoThat's a very real concern. For a long time programming felt like a craft: you build something, run it, improve it. Agent workflows introduce a different kind of work. You're not just building anymore, you're supervising. Some people enjoy that shift toward orchestration. Others really don't. I suspect we'll eventually see tools that try to restore the "build and run" feeling instead of turning developers into supervisors.
- Waterluvian 8mo agoThat really sounds like micro managing jr. developers. I wonder if the interface for this kind of thing might be better presented as a sort of JIRA ticket system. Define a dependency graph of work with the ability to break down any ticket into more tickets or change priority or relationships etc. Though I think the micro manage part still doesn’t fit into that model. You’d need the code-level view and not just a ticket covering the tests that satisfy the spec and performance goals.
- butILoveLife 8mo agoWe've become cashiers. My 6 year old is doing my job. The best I can hope for is that HN article that said the word "Context". I know the magic words "Make me a single page html js web app"... or "Install Virtual Box with Fedora Cinnamon using CLI".... I'm 8x more productive than I was in 2022... And I jokingly say "I'm probably not going to have a job in 1 or 2 years"... We are going to create incredible value to humanity. 8x rate. I don't know what our hourly will be.
- DrewADesign 8mo ago> I'm 8x more productive than I was in 2022... And I jokingly say "I'm probably not going to have a job in 1 or 2 years"... > We are going to create incredible value to humanity. 8x rate. I don't know what our hourly will be. Do we have 8x more demand for software than current developers can currently supply? No, we don’t. Many developers will soon have a very bitter pill to swallow once they realize that developers are the beneficiaries of good market dynamics rather than some precious intellectual elite whose skills are monetizable in any other context. Their hourly will be whatever DoorDash pays them to deliver pizza and egg rolls. Grad school isn’t any safer, and frankly, many of the soft, arrogant and maladroit people I’ve seen try to enter blue collar trades fail very quickly once they realize how hard the road is to get to those high salaries they always hear about.
- foldr 8mo ago>Do we have 8x more demand for software than current developers can currently supply? No, we don’t. Demand for software has been pretty elastic historically. In 1970, the quantity of software that's written now would have seemed absurd (and demand for that amount of software certainly didn't exist back then). I don't know if there'll be another huge increase in the amount of software that gets written or not, but it doesn't seem so implausible. For example, there's a long tail of Excel spreadsheets waiting to be turned into applications. The cheaper it becomes to do that, the more of these spreadsheets become suitable candidates for appification.
- DrewADesign 8mo ago
- dwhitney 8mo agoI feel totally the opposite. I feel like I'm better able to have more work-life balance. Our predictions are more accurate. I'm enjoying working on actual problems rather than boilerplate. These tools are amazing
- kazinator 8mo agoPrior to the rise of LLM coding, developers had to, from time to time, spent time deep diving through large amounts of code they didn't write. Hundreds of thousands of lines or even millions. This might happens when starting a new job, or changing projects, or when tasked with evaluating some third party tech or integrating it, or taking over something that was previously owned by another developer. During such phases of work, it's not unusual to put in some long hours in order to get up to speed. With LLMs, it is possible to perpetually experience hundreds of thousands of lines of third party code, on about a weekly basis. But this is not the same. The code is not known by anyone, anywhere else. It exists nowhere else, and so has no track record of deployment. No documentation, nothing. It's not something where you can concentrate on making a small modification, while trusting the rest of it to be working.
- booleandilemma 8mo agoWhy are we doing this to ourselves?
- wvxf 8mo agoIm waiting for a large incident to occur - something on the level of the Concorde crash - that shuttered any further attempts to going faster in commercial air travel. May take awhile. But it'll come eventually.