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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

#131

Post by busterarm »

blakesterz wrote: post #62

I 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.

Personally 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.

Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration

#132

Post by torginus »

banannaise wrote: post #39

This 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 f…

I mean that sucks, but I have many tales of people, who were passionate and outstanding in what they did, and were rewarded with a leadership position for their efforts.

Now they get to fill out excel sheets, babysit people and sit in planning meetings.

Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration

#133

Post by kstenerud »

epolanski wrote: post #95
kstenerud wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow... 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'…

> Wow... 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. I haven't stated that it's not more capable nor more "intelligent", it's the opposite. I will try to expand on what I mean. LLMs "character/persona/tendencies" are increasingly less about acting as an assistant and more about…

Ah yes, the agents by default are very "implementation" oriented, which is why I instruct mine to never implement something without formulating a plan first for me to approve.

Another thing they tend to do is rely on their own context -> memories -> training data. And if that's wrong then they'll continue with it until you instruct them to research, after which they usually get the right answer.

I've noticed that the newer models keep track of what you type so as to anticipate what you're likely to say. For example, today Opus 4.8 said "You usually don't want me to commit until you've checked, so the change remains uncommitted."

Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration

#134

Post by sanderjd »

plaidthunder wrote: post #119
mettamage wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic, pair programming should have taken off

I always found pair programming a bit.. hellish. Chatting about things. Rubberducking. Playing code review ping pong. All great. But the feeling of being shoulder surfed killed my ability to play around with the freedom that I do when I'm alone -- and that playing around sometimes led to better/more interesting outcomes than I'd have gotten otherwise.

Yeah, I always bought the premise that it was good for the software, but it didn't work for me as a person, it drained my energy way too fast to spend hours of the day having to be "on" in conversation with another person.

In many ways, I think what's working for me with AI is that it is very similar to pair programming, but without the social-emotional investment required to interact with another person for long periods of time.

Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration

#135

Post by erikerikson »

krapp wrote: post #125
erikerikson wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in stupid town we stab ourselves with knives. It hurts and we get infections but everybody does it. We don't even remember why we do it any more but we do so you have to as well. The real problem is the amount of value that gets left on the table. Also, mental health is just as much a part of health and well-being as the physical.

We know why we do it. We do it because we live under a system that requires most of us to bleed for our supper. And now tech is being normalized to work like every other job, and techies get to feel the knife. A lot of people are going to be shocked to realize what their actual relationship to capital has always been.

If we know, why would a lot of us be shocked? Seems contradictory.

That's probably too much a troll so while I get that you are grinding your anti-capitalism axe, you're also seeding hopelessness and trapped falsely fatalistic thinking. It has gone this way but it doesn't have to and the whole arrangement is a local optimum with much higher global optima available.

In fact there are many of us who have created a parallel life and extend ladders all the time (within our capacity) for others to join us.

Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration

#137

Post by ashkulz »

juleiie wrote: post #126
banannaise wrote: post #39

This 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 f…

Many successful people in their 40s could quit work already if they only decreased their monthly costs. I think it is more important than ever to manage your wealth in a way that sustains you from capital alone in a world where employment gets progressively more toxic. The way to achieve it is buying maintenance efficient and cheap car, make renovations smart, make good choices all around to minimise expenses. Operat…

I think that's a very simplistic take, it doesn't account for people who need to support children's education and/or healthcare for parents.

Both are areas where costs are going up at a rate which is much higher than official inflation rates, and comp increases often don't even match inflation!

So the need for working till you're forced to give up still remains.

Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration

#138

Post by solfox »

banannaise wrote: post #39

This 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 f…

I think this is a larger question we should be asking. YES, we can build this world: a world where robots do our chores, serve our coffee, check us out at the grocery store, and let the AI agents do the parts of our jobs we love.

But SHOULD we? With great power comes great responsibility - and I'm getting the impression we're (quickly) building a world that isn't very fun to live in. We technically have a choice here - DO we want bots writing our prose and responding to our customer service inquiries?

Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration

#139

Post by philwelch »

latentsea wrote: post #84
mullingitover wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> customer-service employees who enjoy building relationships but are increasingly expected to supervise AI agents instead. It sucks for the employees, otoh it might be the only way we're going to beat Baumol's Cost Disease. In the past few decades productivity has exploded, but service employees have largely failed to increase productivity in any way because it's harder to automate these tasks. It's the reason the c…

>It's the reason the costs of things like education and healthcare are downright extortionate, the reason you're paying back your college well into your fifties, the reason you don't call an ambulance for someone in the US because you don't want to ruin their life financially. You might wanna think again on that line of reasoning, because plenty of other countries have the same dynamics with respect to service employ…

“If the government pays for it, it’s free!”

Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration

#140

Post by mullingitover »

latentsea wrote: post #84
mullingitover wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> customer-service employees who enjoy building relationships but are increasingly expected to supervise AI agents instead. It sucks for the employees, otoh it might be the only way we're going to beat Baumol's Cost Disease. In the past few decades productivity has exploded, but service employees have largely failed to increase productivity in any way because it's harder to automate these tasks. It's the reason the c…

>It's the reason the costs of things like education and healthcare are downright extortionate, the reason you're paying back your college well into your fifties, the reason you don't call an ambulance for someone in the US because you don't want to ruin their life financially. You might wanna think again on that line of reasoning, because plenty of other countries have the same dynamics with respect to service employ…

My point is simply this: a person who helps individual customers in any industry isn't much more productive today than they were fifty years ago.

That may change, and it may benefit everyone except the people who get fulfillment in their life from the one-on-one human interaction they get from people who need services.

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