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AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it

simonwillison.net

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Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it

#191

Post by anonymars »

sabas123 wrote: post #166
co_king_3 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So everything stays exactly the same? No, we get applications so hideously inefficient that your $3000 developer machine feels like it it's running a Pentium II with 256 MB of RAM. We get software that's as slow as it was 30 years ago, for no reason other than our own arrogance and apathy.

> No, we get applications so hideously inefficient that your $3000 developer machine feels like it it's running a Pentium II with 256 MB of RAM. > We get software that's as slow as it was 30 years ago, for no reason other than our own arrogance and apathy. I feel like I read this exact same take on this site for the past 15 years.

I think the error was to say "as fast"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36446933

Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it

#192

Post by FieryTransition »

falloutx wrote: post #29

I am becoming more and more convinced that AI cant be used to make something better than what could have built before AI. You never needed 1000s of engineers to build software anyway, Winamp & VLC were build by less than four people. You only needed 1000s of people because the executive vision is always to add more useless junk into each product. And now with AI that might be even harder to avoid. This would mean the…

And Unix was mainly made by two people, it's astounding that as I get older, even tech managers don't know "the mythical man month", and how software production generally scales.

Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it

#193

Post by simonw »

windexh8er wrote: post #183
latexr wrote: post #97

> the productivity boost these things can provide is exhausting . What I personally find exhausting is Simon¹ constantly discovering the obvious. Time after time after time it’s just “insights” every person who smoked one blunt in college has arrived at. Stop for a minute! You don’t have to keep churning out multiple blog posts a day, every day. Just stop and reflect . Sit back in your chair and let your mind rest. W…

Simon is a new form of troll and you hit the nail on the head of what: soapboxing the obvious all in the name of AI. Just like the OpenClaw article that hit the FP yesterday, these types of folks are either doing this for marketing or they're really elated by the mediocre. Has Simon actually produced anything novel or compelling? His blog posts surely aren't - so if that's any indication of his work output I wouldn't…

> Has Simon actually produced anything novel or compelling?

Here are some of my recent posts which I self-evaluate as "novel and compelling".

- Running Pydantic’s Monty Rust sandboxed Python subset in WebAssembly https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/6/pydantic-monty/ - demonstrating how easy and useful it is to be able to turn Rust code into WASM that can run independently or be used inside a Python wheel for Pyodide in order to provide interactive browser demos of Rust libraries.

- Distributing Go binaries like sqlite-scanner through PyPI using go-to-wheel https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/4/distributing-go-binarie... - I think my go-to-wheel utility is really cool, and distributing Go CLIs through PyPI is a neat trick.

- ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages, and download files https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/26/chatgpt-containers/ - in which I reverse engineered and documented a massive new feature of ChatGPT that OpenAI hadn't announced or documented anywhere

I remain very proud of my current open source projects too - https://datasette.io and https://llm.datasette.io and https://sqlite-utils.datasette.io and a whole lot more: https://github.com/simonw/simonw/blob/main/releases.md

Are you ready to say none of that is "novel or compelling", in good faith?

Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it

#194

Post by thunky »

FieryTransition wrote: post #192
falloutx wrote: post #29

I am becoming more and more convinced that AI cant be used to make something better than what could have built before AI. You never needed 1000s of engineers to build software anyway, Winamp & VLC were build by less than four people. You only needed 1000s of people because the executive vision is always to add more useless junk into each product. And now with AI that might be even harder to avoid. This would mean the…

And Unix was mainly made by two people, it's astounding that as I get older, even tech managers don't know "the mythical man month", and how software production generally scales.

Sorry but 99.999% of developers could not have built Unix. Or Winamp.

Managers are crossing their fingers that devs they hire are no worse than average, and average isn't very good.

Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it

#195

Post by wolfcola »

PlatoIsADisease wrote: post #168
wolfcola wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you like working 8 hours a day instead of 12? 5 days a week instead of 7? You can thank organized labor.

Those same jobs are no where to be found in the places that the organized labor started. It moved outside the US.

because of a concerted effort to break labor power… you’re making my point.

Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it

#196

Post by simonw »

tzury wrote: post #188

I would learn more about air combat by listening to a 12 minutes conversation with a jet fighter pilot, than I will from 3-day seminar by air force journalists. Tell me about what’s the LLM impact on your work, on account your work is not wiring about AI. Or if one wish for a more explicit noise filter: Don’t tell me what AI can do. Show me what you shipped with it that isn’t about AI.

> Show me what you shipped with it that isn’t about AI.

From this weekend: https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-history-json and https://github.com/datasette/datasette-sqlite-history-json

Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it

#198

Post by throwup238 »

rkomorn wrote: post #95
co_king_3 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So everything stays exactly the same? No, we get applications so hideously inefficient that your $3000 developer machine feels like it it's running a Pentium II with 256 MB of RAM. We get software that's as slow as it was 30 years ago, for no reason other than our own arrogance and apathy.

I find it hard to disagree with this (sadly). I do feels things in general are more "snappy" at the OS level, but once you get into apps (local or web), things don't feel much better than 30 years ago. The two big exceptions for me are video and gaming. I wonder how people who work in CAD, media editing, or other "heavy" workloads etc, feel.

> I wonder how people who work in CAD, media editing, or other "heavy" workloads etc, feel.

I’d let you know how I feel but I’m too busy restarting Solidworks after its third crash of the day. I pay thousands a year for the privilege.

Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it

#199

Post by signatoremo »

co_king_3 wrote: post #125
latexr wrote: post #97

> the productivity boost these things can provide is exhausting . What I personally find exhausting is Simon¹ constantly discovering the obvious. Time after time after time it’s just “insights” every person who smoked one blunt in college has arrived at. Stop for a minute! You don’t have to keep churning out multiple blog posts a day, every day. Just stop and reflect . Sit back in your chair and let your mind rest. W…

> You don’t have to keep churning out multiple blog posts a day, every day. How do you know that? You don't think he's being paid for all this marketing work?

Accusing people of being paid shill from a new account. Ironically.

Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it

#200

Post by PlatoIsADisease »

wolfcola wrote: post #195
PlatoIsADisease wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those same jobs are no where to be found in the places that the organized labor started. It moved outside the US.

because of a concerted effort to break labor power… you’re making my point.

So your solution is to temporarily make big $$$ until the capitalists move overseas?

What is wrong with a the status quo? A competitive market that keeps labor here.

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