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The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers
- solomatov 6mo agoIs there any publication which demonstrates that the improvement is really 10x?
- ggm 6mo agoIt's like "decimate" -you would think 10x had literal force, but it's more figurative. It just means "moar" (decimate had specific literal intent. Now it's just a force modifier like bigly)
- peterashford 6mo agoThe literal meaning was removing 1/10
- nemosaltat 6mo ago> Removing 1/10 feels euphemistic for the original “colloquial” usage I have for it. > The killing of one in ten, chosen by lots, from a rebellious city or a mutinous army was a punishment sometimes used by the Romans. The word has been used (loosely and unetymologically, to the irritation of pedants) since 1660s for "destroy a large but indefinite number of." [0] [0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/decimate https://www.etymonline.com/word/decimate
- peterashford 6mo agoYup. What amuses me is that people think that decimate is to massively degrade something. I assume they're thinking "reduce to 1/10th" rather than "reduce to 9/10th". The effect is markedly different
- zetanor 6mo agoA watched pot never boils. A watched vibe coder never 10x-es.
- kakacik 6mo agoSomebody doesnt know how to regulate their pace, and then various burnout symptoms happen. Not everybody pushes themselves like that, nor should, its anything but healthy and sustainable. In my experience it takes... rather obsessed people, ocd or similar traits, maybe 2 out of 10 intensity of their disease. Highly functional, smart, yet unbalanced. Llms just allow this spiral to go further, while human limits remain the same. Each of us creates our own path, dont mess it up just because you can. Your employer doesnt care much about you at the end, just another cog in machine but health once damaged may not bounce back, ever
- onemoresoop 6mo agoAnd sometimes they do build interesting things but also leave a trail of destruction behind them. It reminds me of ‘moving fast break things’.
- sumeno 6mo agoGiven the research cited in the article it seems bigger than an anecdote about one guy who doesn't know how to do work life balance 70%+ saying that AI has increased their workload AND that they are burning out because is it.
- mynameisash 6mo agoYeah, it's all well and good to say somebody doesn't know how to regulate their pace, and it's another thing for your manager to tell your team that you need to be using a squad of agents constantly. To have a weekly stand-up that is specifically and solely for the purpose of talking about your "AI wins" for the week. To be told that you will be evaluated on how much you're using AI for your job. When your manager and your company regulate your pace for you with the understood threat that not using AI will risk your job, you don't really have much of an option.
- gdulli 6mo agoThat sounds horrible. I'm so glad I saved enough money to retire early right before this madness started.
- aanet 6mo agoI feel this is not discussed enough. I can attest to this 100%. Just the past weekend, I was talking with a very senior engineer (~distinguished engineer at a very large tech co) who basically said he's working 8-8-6 (8 am - 8 pm, 6 days/week), "writing code" (more like supervising 8-15 agents) for a product demo in 2 weeks, which otherwise would have taken at least 1 quarter's worth of time with a small team. He's zonked out, fwiw. There are no junior engineers in the team ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, most having been laid off a few months ago. The toll it takes, and the expectations of AI-driven productivity, have only increased dramatically. At some point, the reality will hit the remaining engg team. Not sure if the company or its leadership realizes, but so far, it's all-AI, all-the-time, human cost of productivity be damned.
- solomatov 6mo ago> more like supervising 8-15 agents How do they do it? (My own record is 5 agents, but it is not typical). Do they use gastown or something?
- azinman2 6mo agoI often have 10+ running in parallel. I’m attacking parallel problems that aren’t interdependent. Sometimes adding additional products can bring me up to 15+. Gotta have really good test harnesses so they can largely fix themselves.
- solomatov 6mo agoBut how do you cover such amount of multi tasking? Could you give an example? I mean what kind of tasks allow such a parallelization?
- htrp 6mo agocontext switching across the entirety of the feature surface for an app You could easily have agents to work on login page, messaging feature, database/data model update, recommender system, backend api, etc
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- rvz 6mo ago> The industry calls this “10x productivity.” I call it what it is: a system that generates output at machine speed and forces humans to process it at biological speed. The question is can you tolerate the amount of PRs thrown at you per day on top of reviewing the exponentially growing mess of code that continues to double every hour and being paid less for it. Just learn to say no and leave. Why do you tolerate the increasing comprehension debt that is loaded on to you. You will never get that time back. Just give it to someone else that thinks it is worth maintaining that slop for less.
- basilgohar 6mo agoThe job market under our Great Leader has taken away a lot of this agency. Software engineers have gone from having the pick of the market for themselves to becoming (perceived as) next to disposable.
- spaqin 6mo agoThat's a very American-centric point of view; the job market worldwide for developers is getting tougher and tougher.
- basilgohar 6mo agoI'm willing to have my leader take some of the blame for this as well. I think the decisions of the leader of the what's still the largest economy of the world likely has an outsized impact on the rest of the world too. It's getting less and less, for sure, but still significant. I'm not trying to be American-centric, I'm trying to accept that what we do has an impact despite unequally applied isolationist mentality of some here.
- zthrowaway 6mo agoCan definitely attest to this. The frequency of outages at my company have increased drastically the past year, especially ever since incorporating agentic development. I’m seeing all of the dev best practices go out the window. We have a few vibe coders that are posting 15-30 PR’s per day. It’s way too much for us to review. We’re not a big shop. I think we’re going to have to hire more people just to review code across the industry. And those people will have to know how to actually write software otherwise what are they even reviewing. Maybe the models will get so good they never make a mistake. Doubt it.
- bensyverson 6mo agoI wonder if the PR workflow is just unsustainable in the agentic era. Rather than review every new feature or bug fix, we would depend on good test coverage, and hold developers accountable for what they ship. The result might be more faulty code getting merged, but if you already have outages and can't review every PR, is there currently a meaningful benefit to the PR workflow?
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 6mo agoDiogenes carrying a lamp, looking for good test coverage
- turtleyacht 6mo agoCopy-pasting screenshots of red lines.
- dwattttt 6mo agoThis is the "if you're already letting faults through, why not give up trying to stop faults?" approach.
- bensyverson 6mo agoThe alternative might be "what if we could get the genie back into the bottle?" We know some people are using LLMs to evaluate PRs, the only question is who, and how strong the incentive is for them to give up.
- aetherspawn 6mo ago… how are you getting actual usable output at that scale? I have to baby my AI in 1 minute increments or it just doesn’t arrive at the correct solution at all. Using Codex 5.2
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- strange_quark 6mo agoI mean, why do you think people are burning out?
- ed_balls 6mo agoDue to prolonged stress, which lack of control is the main contributor e.g. you have expectations, you cannot control variable x,y,z, which leads to stress, which over long period of causes burn out.
- strange_quark 6mo agoIn case it wasn’t obvious, I was being facetious. You can’t just let the AI rip without putting effort into constructing good input and verifying the output and expect anything good to happen, which is what the gp was asking. There’s no secret into how people are getting “10x”, or at least claiming to, they’re just working more.
- wfme 6mo agoPerhaps the prompts you are using could do with some love. We're pretty consistently getting great results up to and beyond the 10 minute mark in a large monorepo. We tend to use Opus 4.6 High and GPT 5.4 High.
- TuringNYC 6mo agoI can attest to this. Ultimately I dont think it is possible to 10x output systems with AI and actually keep the traditional quality controls (yet.) IMHO you just need two stacks -- systems where you can play fast and loose and 10x output. And systems where quality matters where you can perhaps 1.5 or 2x. That is still a lot of output.
- vomayank 6mo ago[flagged]
- hgoel 6mo agoUsing vibe coding for frequent PRs seems insanely reckless. In my scientific computing environment, the majority of my vibe coded output goes to one-off scripts, stuff that is not worth committing (correcting outputs, one-off visualizations, consistency checks), and anything worth committing gets further refined to an extent that it pretty much can't be considered vibe coded anymore. It's simply too risky, any bugs would propagate down to decision making for designing new, expensive instruments. I imagine that the cost and trust risks in enterprise environments are similar, so this seems very reckless. AI Agents have helped up my productivity, but that's specifically because I can focus on the science, and delegate the auxiliary things to AI. I also believe I get this productivity out of them because my supervisor really drove home how hard I need to go on consistency checks and years of having my visualizations nitpicked (so I am able to do the same to AI and recognize when results are suspicious).
- teaearlgraycold 6mo agoI love vibe coding for little tools like that. Tools which can have their outputs quickly validated, and then throw them away. Like a jig in woodworking.
- stackskipton 6mo agoMost people don't care. Leadership is demanding feature, feature, feature. IC are worried about losing their jobs and outages rarely cost most business actual money. So garbage gets shipped, outages rise, everyone is burned out but since they can't find another job, they remain.
- chii 6mo agoIn this situation, you raise the issue with management, with a paper trail that Cover Your Ass, that the pace is unsustainable and bugs will continue to accumulate faster than it can be fixed. Make sure that you are not responsible for it and ensure this is known by all (including management). You then continue to vibe code as instructed by management. No burnout because you are not responsible anymore.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- ok_dad 6mo agoI love it. I was getting burnt out due to ADHD or autism burnout but with AI tooling I’m able to work a full week without burnout. I think the kind of burnout I get is helped with these tools, but since I’m not neurotypical it’s different from the burnout people are getting from doing too much. I do see “task expansion” happening often though. If I can do the full feature rather than doing baby steps I’ll often do that now, because wrangling code is easier.
- robbrown451 6mo ago[dead]
- Incipient 6mo agoI'm a mostly solo dev, and I'm finding that being purely code-review for an AI is sub-optimal. Too often the AI runs off down bad paths which you only realise later, and unpicking the mess is most likely a productivity loss. Working more as a pair, or essentially doing code review as you go, in small chunks, is significantly better. I personally don't have the setup of tokens to spend to say "go build this entire thing" and then review 15k loc. I also find even opus is poor at coming up with tests to justify the business logic it's meant to be implementing.
- cadamsdotcom 6mo agoYou can write your own linters for every dumb AI mistake, add them as pre-commit checks, and never see that mistake in committed code ever again.. it’s really empowering. You don’t even have to code the linters yourself. The agent can write a python script that walks the AST of the code, or uses regex, or tries to run it or compile it. Non zero exit code and a line number and the agent will fix the problem then and rerun the linter and loop until it passes. Lint your architecture - block any commit which directly imports the database from a route handler. Whatever the coding agent thinks - ask it for recommendations for an approach! Get out of the business of low level code review. That stuff is automatable and codifiable and it’s not where you are best poised to add value, dear human.
- iroddis 6mo agoThe “programming is an act of externalizing a mental model” vs “a code review is reverse engineering the model, then verifying its reasoning” really hit home. Even before AI code reviews required a lot of mental effort for me. AI has made an already difficult process much more prevalent.