Isn’t this just the new type of work? Human in the loop of automated processes?
Welcome to the factory!
Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration
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Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our 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.
Maybe this is the AI layoff wave we'll see. Sorting out incompetent team members.
the ones who spend all day telling the bosses how great AI is?
Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration
#13Isn’t this just the new type of work? Human in the loop of automated processes? Welcome to the factory!
Like Chaplin in Modern Times, we will tighten screws until we lose our minds.
Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration
#14“the incredible ground-level utility that many of us on HN celebrate every day through undeniable, massive productivity gains” I’ve been told before.
I'm yet to be invited to the celebrations.
Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration
#15I'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.
Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration
#166 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 w…
I 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.
Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration
#17I'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 i…
It 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.
Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration
#18Isn’t this just the new type of work? Human in the loop of automated processes? Welcome to the factory!
Yeah, 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.
Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration
#19I'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 i…
Your experience pretty much mirrors my own. I hate to be the 'they're holding it wrong' guy but there's certainly a lot of people out there that have no real idea how to effectively leverage AI.
Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration
#20I 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
Our 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.
So 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.