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Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration
- DGAP 4mo agoDon't worry, soon you won't have a job.
- stogot 4mo agoI could care less about bot sitting (haven’t we always written our own automation?), but it’s botsitting the unverified slop that people send you that fuels frustration. I thought I worked with competent people who respected me
- reluctant_dev 4mo agoOur product lead/manager recently sent me an AI generated PRD (complete with a Claude Code spec!) to build a core feature which we have had for over 2 years (and is a highly used core feature by our customers). I just can't imagine tanking my trust with my coworkers by doing something like that.
- tommek4077 4mo agoMaybe this is the AI layoff wave we'll see. Sorting out incompetent team members.
- liveoneggs 4mo agothe ones who spend all day telling the bosses how great AI is?
- rozap 4mo agoSo we're now in this world where everyone is instantly 10x more productive at turning their thoughts into code. Now, think about the coworkers you've had that are middling to mediocre. Do you want them to have a tool that makes them 10x more productive? That's what I wonder about, what happens to all those folks.
- alex_suzuki 4mo agoIn the worst case it’s an even greater “productivity” boost for those mediocre folks, as they will also undoubtedly be less critical of its output.
- loloquwowndueo 4mo ago*couldn’t care less
- kerblang 4mo agoIt's not a lack of respect for you; it's a lack of respect for the work itself. That lack is being rewarded and encouraged. Managers will be sure to tell you how much they respect you. Ask them if they respect the work and you'll get a blank stare.
- yaodub 4mo agoYour coworkers haven't changed. What changed is that people can hand off work they never had to think through themselves. So you don't know what they checked and you don't know what you need to. You just have to read the whole thing.
- intended 4mo agoUnderstanding what is going on with AI productivity is … frustrating to say the least. The best I can say is that genAI is a self reported a 20% efficiency boost, and for a very (very) small group of people, it’s maybe a 2-3x boost. (And if you are at a frontier lab, you go fly into the big bucket of exceptions) At this point, for most use cases, AI productivity is either the equivalent of giving people 3D printers, and seeing little benefit, or signing up for an outsourcing service, just without the development of human capital anywhere.
- righthand 4mo agoI think it depends on how you measure the boost. If you are talking about generating a first draft then yes, the boost is there. If you’re talking about completing the project in all well tested and architected aspects, then overall there really isn’t a boost. 6 hours of debugging and docs reading is not equal to 6 hours of prompt fiddling. The return of value beyond the few fixes applied will be almost nil from the fiddling.
- oudlys 4mo ago>Understanding what is going on with AI productivity is … frustrating to say the least. Agreed. I think one of the hardest things about it is that productivity != value. You can push all the code you want, but if it's not driving revenue up or cost down, it doesn't matter economically. Here is the best data I've been able to find. An observational study of 4000 teams over 2 years across many different organizations. Data gathered from their task management, version control, and CI/CD tooling. Critically - this is not survey data. It's much more direct measurement. https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-acceleration-whiplash-takeaways https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-acceleration-whiplash-takeaways Faros argues that teams are seeing about a 16% throughput improvement (PR merge rate) with heavy AI use. I argue here that their data actually indicates negative absolute impact on throughput. https://unessays.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap https://unessays.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap
- righthand 4mo ago“the incredible ground-level utility that many of us on HN celebrate every day through undeniable, massive productivity gains” I’ve been told before.
- loopmonster 4mo agoI'm yet to be invited to the celebrations.
- rocketpastsix 4mo ago6 hours a week is low, unless its the average spread across industries. I think I spend more time in Claude Code via the CLI versus any other app I have on my laptop. Like others said, the frustration is when it gets something so wrong you just think "wow, how'd you mess that up?" but when it gets it right its kind of nice. I also dont like that I basically tell Claude what to do, and then either go to busy work or waste time on the internet.
- comboy 4mo agoI kind of enjoy exploring black boxes, trying how different inputs are mapping to differences in outputs. It's kind of like hacking. The problem is, they keep altering the box.
- marcosdumay 4mo agoThe box is stochastic by design, and has an untraceable amount of complexity between its context and output by nature. It may be fun to look at inputs and outputs, but it's not hackable and trying to map one into the other is more like astrology than a science.
- masfuerte 4mo agoIt's copromancy. Picking through the clanker's doings in an attempt to predict the future.
- utopiah 4mo agoThanks, you taught me a new word today! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scatomancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scatomancy
- marcosdumay 4mo agoIt feels like Greek mythology should have some metaphor for "apparently simple structure that is so complex it leads anybody that studies it into madness". But I can't think of any name to put there. Maybe the idea of complexity is too modern.
- Aboutplants 4mo agoIsn’t this just the new type of work? Human in the loop of automated processes? Welcome to the factory!
- hootz 4mo agoLike Chaplin in Modern Times, we will tighten screws until we lose our minds.
- mschuster91 4mo agoYeah, Amazon warehouses are just the same. Humans are only used for tasks beyond the comprehension or physical ability of a machine at that point in time. The problem is, we haven't had the debate on a societal level if we want to go the star trek route (aka, we give our darn best to automate everything so that humans have the time to do whatever they want) or the realcommunism route (we ward off automation so that we have jobs for people). The result of that debate not having been made is the third possible outcome - rabid capitalism automates everything as soon as it is profitable and lays off the humans, focusing on getting higher margins out of less people if need be; the best example for that IMHO is Disneyland or Vegas going on ridiculous nickel-and-diming tours. In the end however, there will be no one left any more who has employment and we'll be in for quite the riots.
- kstenerud 4mo agoI've found that setting good guardrails, and running in a sandbox so that the agent doesn't keep asking tedious permission questions, makes things go a LOT smoother. Generally, I spend anywhere between 15 mins and an hour setting things up (depending on how well the project is set up for AI work), and then set the agent going, coming back in a half-hour to an hour to check its progress. Generally, the tooling keeps it honest (for golang, forbidigo is AWESOME). 80% of the questions the agent asks me require a lot of thought. 20% of what it does needs correction. The other thing to remember with LLMs is that they are NOT human, and won't react in a human way. So you'll see strikes of "brilliance" followed by the absolutely bizarre. But good guardrails keep that to a minimum.
- epolanski 4mo agoIt doesn't change the premise. AI should be assisting us, instead it's doing the job and it's us being an assistant to it. This is a monumental shift that people seem to be missing in how knowledge working is changing and it's going beyond mere coding. Guardrails, prompts, whatever, it's us helping it doing the job, not the other way around. Opus 4.6 was the last genuinely good assistant LLM, but since then it's quite clear that the training/reinforcement is focused "given prompt -> do task" so it's behavior is more and more about doing it itself, not helping you. If you try to use it as an assistant it just sucks and is perma wired into finding the solution. Many times I want it to help me investigate, and his answer will still be focused on the fix, not answering my questions. 4.7 first, 4.8 later and fable are absolute disasters as assistants. Fable in particular is so "intelligent" that it will push with very strong and intelligent takes even if it is completely wrong. I have never disliked our job more.
- kstenerud 4mo agoWow... Our experiences have been very different, then. I've found each upgrade of Opus to be a noticeable improvement in its complex reasoning and delegation capabilities over its predecessor. To me, this feels in many ways like a technical manager or team lead's job, where I guide the process along using my knowledge and experience, and then let the agent fill in the rest (to the best of its ability). The agent can't really learn from its mistakes (at least, not without consuming precious context), so I apply a blameless postmortem process, updating the guardrails whenever it goes astray in the same way more than once. And really, I'd rather be contemplating the more difficult and interesting questions of architecture, environment, ergonomics and market fit, so it suits me fine.
- parpfish 4mo agoi've seen a number of articles claiming things like "devs self report they'er +x% more productive with AI, but actually they're -y% LESS efficient!". and i think that this is explanation for why. as a boss (or researcher) i'm going to measure productivity based on amount of output per hour that i'm paying you; as a workers, i'm going to measure productivity based on amount of output relative to the amount of effort i'm putting in. so what may be happening is that bosses see that output is at 80% (productivity down!) but workers see that they can give that 80% output with 40% effort (productivity up!).
- therealdrag0 4mo agoDo you have any studies in the last 6 months showing performance decreases?
- oudlys 4mo agoMarch 2026: https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-acceleration-whiplash-takeaways https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-acceleration-whiplash-takeaways Faros would tell you shops are shipping 16% more PRs with heavy AI use. https://unessays.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap https://unessays.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap I think that's wrong because it doesn't adequately account for the quality and rework their data show.
- Ifkaluva 4mo ago> so what may be happening is that bosses see that output is at 80% (productivity down!) but workers see that they can give that 80% output with 40% effort (productivity up!). So why is it that the bosses are the ones that are so enthusiastic about adoption?
- jofla_net 4mo agoWell the obvious is that, monkey-see-monkey-do, and they don't want to miss out. But the insidious externality is that they are the most likely ones (and higher ups) to be invested in nvidia and others, so when they push you to use, it creates a viscous cycle.
- soared 4mo agoI spend at least 6 hours a week arguing with bots owned by other teams, as I’m unable to reach a human before I bypass their bot. 10k person company, clients are paying for my time.
- RA_Fisher 4mo agoIt may be that they’re protecting their time.
- cbg0 4mo agoJust build a bot to bypass their bot.
- sevenzero 4mo agoCorpo bullshittery is the best kind of work. Get paid without actually ever doing anything. Its heaven.
- vovavili 4mo agoBeing alienated from the outcome of your labor is far from my idea of heaven.
- marcosdumay 4mo agoThat's some odd image of heaven.
- fasterik 4mo ago
- axus 4mo agoBot-sitting is the new long compilation times.
- clippy99 4mo agoJust 6 hours, lol!
- btbuildem 4mo agoMy favourite personal experience is how they disabled yolo mode in Claude Code at my workplace
- banannaise 4mo agoThis really hit home for me: In some cases, workers are also being asked to automate the parts of their jobs they enjoy most, Hinds said on the podcast, pointing to customer-service employees who enjoy building relationships but are increasingly expected to supervise AI agents instead. "That's what gives you joy and meaning at work," she said. "That is very dangerous." What's a 20% productivity gain if I constantly feel deflated by work that used to energize me? That's going to give back the productivity gain and more, while also decreasing my quality of life.
- add-sub-mul-div 4mo agoIt's like if your career switched from solving puzzles to filling out TPS reports.
- strken 4mo agoFor me it feels less like filling out reports, and more like mentoring an intern who can search for stuff really quickly but forgets everything at the end of the day due to anterograde amnesia. Except the intern is trapped inside an iron lung and must communicate entirely by text. And also has zero real creativity or self-motivation.
- jader201 4mo ago> What's a 20% productivity gain Where did the 20% number come from? I’d argue it’s way more than that (or variable, i.e. dependent on who’s using it/how it’s being used/what it’s being used on). Having said that, the number, to me, doesn’t even matter. You could replace that with 200%, and it’d be just as true.
- data-ottawa 4mo agoThe cynic in me has learned one is measurable and can go on a slide deck, the other is vague and hard to measure.
- ge96 4mo agoWhen I was given a semi-ultimatum "use AI or get fired" kind of thing for writing code I had a brief bout of depression/sadness. Whereas my friend doesn't care/says "I get paid to not work". I have gotten past it, now I'm just like, I'll do what I need to do to get paid since unfortunately I'm in a lot of debt so I need this job. I learned to code in 2013 so I like typing the code myself but now it seems like a waste of time. I still write my own code for myself/hardware hobby.
- peter_d_sherman 4mo ago'Botsitting' -- that word is going into my 2026 lexicon! :-)
- jmuguy 4mo agoI don't see a lot of talk about how AI development breaks the old feedback loop of write code, watch it run, change it, repeat. I really hate sitting around waiting for the agent to get done planning, reading the plan, then waiting for the agent to get done coding. It's those 5-10 minute windows when its working that really sap my patience and suck all the fun out of our jobs. Writing code by hand is just more fun.
- hombre_fatal 4mo agoI don't mind the workflow since I'll spawn new agent sessions in new terminal tabs until my attention is saturated by round-robin'ing through them. It's actually kinda pleasant, especially when I consider all the tickets I'm not excited about doing. It's prob worth focusing on that aspect of it.
- thewebguyd 4mo ago> Writing code by hand is just more fun. This is something that I don't see discussed a lot in these conversations, but its true for a ton of folks. I didn't end up with a career in tech because I wanted to tell a bot to do the fun part of my job for me, leaving me only with the boring tedious parts. I didn't sign up to be a full time code reviewer, and I certainly never wanted to be a manager, yet alone a manager of bots. It also can't help but spark feelings of "Why am I getting paid 6 figures for this??" and that makes me nervous for the future. I imagine the engineers and assemblers in factories pre-assembly line felt the same when things started getting automated there. There's an element of craftsmanship that gets taken away as the product moves from being artisanal, hand crafted to mass produced. I wonder if its too late for me to pivot to hardware
- jmuguy 4mo agoYeah its hard to deny just the raw throughput from the AI. Like it really is doing work in hours that would take me days. But those times when I had to drop down into a repl and play around with the output of a method. Or try different ways of doing what anyone else would think is boring, like array manipulation - that's a lot of what I actually LIKE to do. A big part of me just hopes I can hang in there for another... decade, or two. Then I can retire! Maybe.
- paulsutter 4mo agoIt takes years to adapt fully to new tools, and it takes years for the toolmakers to figure out what the tools need to do This is all normal. It’s also well worth the time spent learning
- chattermate 4mo ago[flagged]
- organsnyder 4mo agoMy challenge has been trying to manage my higher-level context. I've gotten a pretty good setup where I have project-level orchestrator agents that can spin up workers to implement tasks with minimal oversight, and the resulting work is usually quite good (especially after I give it the mandatory "make the comments less verbose" refining, etc.). But that means I'm doing even more context-switching. I've gotten to the point where I have a half-dozen draft PRs that just need my review before I tag my colleagues, and trying to dig up the context from all of those tasks can be paralyzing.
- giancarlostoro 4mo agoThis kind of reminds me of an article that I saw on HN ages back, there's like a subset of office workers who automated their Excel jobs, and just show up to work, read books, and do literally anything, while Excel does their work for them, and they collect their paycheck.
- blakesterz 4mo agoI just started using Claude Code for my work as a sysadmin. For my work, it's great. I don't need to wrestle with MySQL joins, claude gets even the most complex ones right WAY faster than I would. Same with new Terraform stuff. Things that would have taken me a day are cut to less than an hour. So for my work, it's made me much better at my job. Much faster and more accurate.
- data-ottawa 4mo agoI don’t know. I can write a simple query before Claude finishes reading, querying the semantic layer, checking my files, then writes a query that I have to approve, reads the results, hides them (ctrl+o usually works), and gives me a summary. We’ve reached this inflection point where it’s faster for me to do most tasks again. I’m sure fast mode costing more money plays a role.
- busterarm 4mo agoPersonally I find LLMs absolutely terrible at writing Terraform and full of hallucinations. But also Terraform is my bread and butter and our use/workflow is fairly advanced. And we're multi-cloud + baremetal. That wasn't an area where I was going to get a ton of value out of LLMs anyway.
- xhkkffbf 4mo agoAnd if management decides we don't need those 6 hours of human work, will everyone still be complaining?
- _pdp_ 4mo agoIt is surprising! I would have thought it is at least 6 hours per day.
- guluarte 4mo agoFor me, AI can sometimes create a false sense of productivity. It's similar to how in the past, people would spend time creating the perfect setup with notion templates, pomodoro timers and productivity tools, or tweaking their environment for maximum productivity, instead of actually doing productive work. But now it's happening at the company level: "We're going to add a chatbot to increase productivity! Now MCP tools! Then agentic workflows! We’ll add skills, and now productivity will go up! Maybe loops will do it?"
- lionkor 4mo agoYou pay per token, even on subscription models the limit is tokens. If I was valued at 1 trillion dollars, and I was in the hole enough to sink a couple small countries' GDP, maybe I would slowly start to optimize to maximize token usage. I want to sell tokens, how do I sell more tokens? Not by doing the same work in less tokens, that's for sure. This is like if you pay me by the hour and then excitedly tell me that you keep paying 10k a month and it's great. I will most certainly not work faster, in this hypothetical, if you tell me you love spending money because it gives you a dopamine rush. I would probably spend a couple more hours REALLY thinking about the task, maybe writing some docs nobody will read, maybe considering multiple options, doing benchmarks, doing research, and then later maybe ill do the actual task as well. Im not saying these AI companies are scamming us, but the incentives are there and extremely clear. The only thing currently holding it back is that there is some vague kind of competition.
- treyd 4mo agoIt'd probably still be worth it to make tokens cheaper. Jevons paradox [1] seems to apply here, where making compute cheaper unlocks use cases that were previously priced out, increasing overall demand. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
- jgil 4mo agoAnthropic just said they're going to limit the ability of the new model to assist with building foundational models. The ability to assess the user's goal and tune the inference accordingly is there. So, what methods are there to tell if a provider has their thumb on the scale? Plodding along a longer path to the same goal would burn more tokens without necessarily a decrease in solution quality. Maybe a few more docs.
- bitwize 4mo agoI don't know what they're complaining about. AI has freed us from the drudgery of craftsmanship, letting us focus on the important stuff—managerial and administrative work! (There's a reason why I call it the MBA's stone. It transmutes all knowledge work into a problem of management.)
- xorgun 4mo ago[dead]
- tarkin2 4mo agoI theorise that many social ills come from workers having less pride in their skills and achievements, and a greater sense of social alienation, due to automation. If you spend countless hours at work, and you partially define yourself by your work, and you realise you are easily replaceable then I cannot imagine this comes without mass social malaise that manifests itself elsewhere. When you know you're essentially babysitting the workhorse to ensure it doesn't go off the rails, I can't see job satisfaction, and the social consequences of such, increasing.
- stringfood 4mo agoI'll be in my woodshop!
- delecti 4mo ago> I theorise that many social ills come from workers having less pride in their skills and achievements, and a greater sense of social alienation, due to automation. Welcome comrade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation I agree entirely. Even in an idealistic fully egalitarian post-scarcity society, to truly be happy I think most people would need to do work that they can feel a sense of accomplishment about. The problem is that work at most jobs is increasingly just toil. Any possibility to scrape some tiny flakes of satisfaction out of the toil gets removed, often for no good reason.
- ekjhgkejhgk 4mo ago[flagged]
- tarkin2 4mo agoBelieving pride in ones work is important, a communist makes you not. And sweeping ideas away by categorising the idea is the destruction of debate.
- ekjhgkejhgk 4mo agoSorry, I was being provocative more than anything. I should've said nothing.
- abc123abc123 4mo agoAs always... no AI-hypester ever talks about Amdahls law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law).
- pramodbiligiri 4mo agoThere was one good analysis from that viewpoint recently: https://x.com/addyosmani/status/2059844244907696186 https://x.com/addyosmani/status/2059844244907696186
- toshikatsu-oga 4mo ago[flagged]
- zwischenzug 4mo agoI see some similarity to how I felt when library management/wrangling became a huge part of software development. In the last century I enjoyed crafting my own 'libraries' of functions that I could then use on the projects I worked on. As time went on, there was less and less of a point doing that as the odds rose near to 100% that there was 'a library for that' thing I was working on, so I was encouraged/forced to download it and use it. It solved problems and was quicker than writing bespoke code (and libraries were hardly a new idea), so the logic was hard to deny, but I enjoyed my job less over time. Now I've risen up the ranks and now code mostly for fun (yes, I use AI to write functions for me) I look at what it must be like to enter the industry and think it all looks very different to how it did when I started. You could argue that AI has done this much faster than it did in my early career, so people have less of the 'boiling frog' experience I had, and more of a 'sudden shock' to the system. It's sad, but I've been doing this to other industries all my career, so I can hardly complain.
- snow_mac 4mo agoI am actively developing on 4 projects fulltime. Kind of like double or triple dipping but just 1 employer. With a Claude Code license I'm running 2-4 CLI instances with AI. I'm botsitting 6-8 hours a day and getting more done then every. I love how much I can build using AI
- kradeelav 4mo agoi was a senior designer that basically had to reclass to a manager/senior manager role just to keep a job that didn't touch AI as much. the wild thing is, i liked my job 3 years ago. i liked the satisfaction of creating for sales. they could be annoying, but it was minor normal (human) corporate squabbles. now, when they're explicitly bragging about getting rid of designers and treating us as sub-human, it's creating resentment and misery. personally job satisfaction sharply decreased in the last 6 months let alone the last 3 years - i'd say from 80% happy to 20%. personally, i think suicides are probably going to be on the rise in a big way specifically due to this; and that's just the people who can hang onto a job right now; cannot tell you how many designers and animators are out of jobs and desperate.
- jazz9k 4mo agoIt's already becoming a racket. I have barely technical people I knew from college pushing the latest AI certification (I can't imagine this staying relevant for longer than 6 months) and one being hired as a frontier AI engineer. It reminds me of 2000 all over again where knowing html got you a six-figure job.
- itrunsdoomguy 4mo ago6 hours which could be spent playing Doom!
- urkedburked 4mo ago[dead]
- threethirtytwo 4mo agoGuys you are privileged to do a job that you love. The privilege is even higher when the things you love aren’t even needed anymore. If this is the case you are on the verge of losing your job. Key word is verge. Not yet, but the trendlines point to it as a likely possibility.
- butterlesstoast 4mo agoThis is something I am very curious to learn from others since I am, relatively speaking, quite new to HN. HN posts seem to go from very supportive to very critical of AI with very few articles striking a balance. Was there a time or technology phase in the past (I'm thinking perhaps when everyone was going over to GraphQL just because of the hype) that you recall being similar to this? If so, how did you maintain curiosity without feeling yourself go through the extremes of "This is the worst / best thing to ever happen"?
- x187463 4mo agoHN has a huge user base. If the article is pro-AI, you'll see top comments praising AI. If the article is anti-AI, you'll see top comments deriding AI. The article and headline is just an attractor to those whose opinion is aligned. It's not unique to AI, basically every thread has your typical nerd-fights, but AI has been particularly polarizing for many reasons.
- sph 4mo agoTrue but it also depends on the initial audience that sets the tone, and the time zone. In my empirical experience, pro-AI posts fare much better when West Coast is awake, and response is more muted when Europe is awake.
- elektrontamer 4mo agoWe're also forced to use it. I can't stand it. Want to just quit the business altogether. Maybe become an electrician or something.
- josefritzishere 4mo agoAI is so underwhelming. I can't believe we are spending millions on this junk.
- implexa_founder 4mo ago[flagged]
- specproc 4mo agoIt's horrifying how many people I see here being threatened into using AI. I guess I'm fortunate in that I have a choice. I've used it plenty, more recently than ever before, but I'm coming more and more to the conclusion I don't want anything to do with it. Botsitting is low-skilled. Low-mental reward work will become low-financial reward work before long. I was initially worried that I had to keep up, learn the new tools or get left behind. But I'm beginning to see it as an entirely different domain of work, and one I'm fine not doing. I think I'm best off preserving my skills and autonomy, rather than fighting with an agent and fretting about tokens for the foreseeable. I've no desire to be a botsitter. Worst case scenario, this really is the future, and I become unemployable in tech: I've done other sorts of work in the past, things I'm happy returning to if this is the future. I've a hunch that's still going to be a while off. I hope so anyway.
- dsfasfasfadsf 4mo ago[flagged]