AI is making us work more • Hacker News Board

Re: AI is making us work more

#201

Post by lotsofpulp » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 6:38 PM UTC

thewebguyd wrote: post #177

pmg101 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say you could automate your job and go on a hike. Great! You can have a fun hike. But you wouldn't get paid for that. I think it's broadly reasonable that you would only be paid for doing something someone else needs doing.

> But you wouldn't get paid for that.f Maybe you wouldn't, but you definitely should. Knowledge workers aren't paid for their labor (in the form of me trading my time and effort for wages), knowledge workers are paid for impact. I'm trading my ability to reason, decide, and create value for the company. I'm valuable not because I sit at a desk and type for 8 hours. I'm valuable because the outputs of my thinking help…

These are contradictory claims:

>In essence, my salary is a retainer. It's payment to keep my expertise availalbe, and working for my employers instead of someone else.

>It's not payment for activity or time.

If the latter statement is true, then you must not have any mandatory hours to be present.

If you do have mandatory hours to be present, then the latter statement is not true.

Re: AI is making us work more

#202

Post by lovich » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 6:38 PM UTC

ashanoko wrote: post #139

To be honest the self confidence of ai is rubbing off on the species in a good way. As in suddenly there is somebody there who beliefs in you, unlike that family that constantly sabotage you, the partner that tries to keep your ego in a "handleable due to absence of success" shape. And all those ideologies that want to cripple any one standing out, they can take a hike. So what if its confidently wrong, at least it b…

Buddy, be careful of going down the ai psychosis path.

No one is 100% correct all the time. Leaning on an AI model because it glazes you 24/7 and does tell you that you are correct 100% of the time doesn’t mean it right about you, its just a seductive trap to fall into and the models are very good at telling you the next thing you want to hear

Re: AI is making us work more

#203

Post by jrowen » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 6:43 PM UTC

This is due to the flawed cornerstone of our culture that a person's job is their worth and value and purpose in the world. This was necessary when the combined efforts of our labor were still not enough to provide basic needs for the people.

The dream of automation was always to fix that. We did that, and more. We have long had the technology to provide for people. But we invent tons of meaningless unnecessary jobs and still cling to the "jobs" model because that's all we know. It's the same reason vaccuum cleaners didn't reduce the amount of cleaning work to be done. We never say "great, I can do less now because I have a thing to do it for me." That thing just enables me to fixate on the next thing "to be done." The next dollar to be gained.

A McDonalds robot should free the people of doing that kind of work. But instead those people become "unemployed" and one individual gets another yacht and creates a couple "marketing" jobs that don't actually provide any value in a holistic humanitarian sense.

Re: AI is making us work more

#204

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 6:45 PM UTC

acuozzo wrote: post #168

saxenaabhi wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> See, these two things seem at odds to me. I suppose it is, to a degree, knowledge that you can learn over time: that an LLM is suitable for renaming files but not for certain other tasks. But for me, I'd be really cautious about letting an AI rename a collection of files, to the point that the same restrictions apply as would apply to a script: I'd need to create the prompt, verify the output via a dry run or test…

> don't we all use VC? This assumes you're working with text files. What if you're working with ~100MiB (each!) frames from a scan of a 35mm movie? (Note: This isn't fictional. I've worked with file-sets like this in film restoration many times.)

[deleted]

Re: AI is making us work more

#205

Post by figers » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 6:47 PM UTC

OptionOfT wrote: post #114

For me, it is making my work miserable. I'm seeing amount of changes needed to produce new features when coding with these AI tools constantly increasing, due to the absence of a proper foundation, and due to the willingness of people to accept it, with the idea that 'we can change it quickly'. It has become acceptable to push those changes in a PR and present them as your own, filled with filler comments that are in…

I reject commits like this, make them re-write it and explain why such and such coding will never be allowed in our code base.

Forces the change in coding practice.

Re: AI is making us work more

#206

Post by fainpul » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 6:54 PM UTC

xg15 wrote: post #136

I'd like to know, from people who really believe that we just need to invent the right technology , then we could all do 20 hour weeks and spend the rest of the time in leisure, what keeps them from doing that right now, and what exactly they believe that miracle tech would change. It seems relatively obvious to me that if a society has work as its cultural core then no amount of productivity increase will get rid of…

Some people seem to be under the impression that they (the employees) and their employers are a team, working towards the same goal (a better life with more spare time for everyone).

I just wrote this comment in another thread, but it fits here too:

The development, production and use of machines to replace labour is driven by employers to produce more efficiently, to gain an edge and make more money.

You, as an employee, are just means to an end. "The company" doesn't care about you and you will not reap the benefits of whatever efficiency improvements the future brings.

Re: AI is making us work more

#207

Post by overfeed » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 6:58 PM UTC

donatj wrote: post #128

BeetleB wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first engineering job was non-SW, and had a lot of manual work. I automated a lot of it. Yes, it led to more work. What would take half a day could now be done in an hour. So we now had to produce 4x more. I spent 4 years there automating left and right. Everyone silently hated me. One of the problems with my automation was that it allowed for more and more Q/A. And the more you check for quality issues, the more…

I have a friend who automated his entire days work down to the click of a single button. He did not tell management because they were pretty scummy. He got written up for not "looking busy" despite his output being higher than his coworkers. Business is stupid. They value busy-ness over productivity.

> Business is stupid. They value busy-ness over productivity.

Not stupid, just entitled to all of your innovation and productivity while you're on the clock (if waged) and off the clock (if you're salaried). If you've shown yourself to be an outlier - that's great for the business - and congratulations, you've aet yourself a new baseline. Isn't class economics just delightful[1]?

The only employees who have a more direct linkage between productivity and income are sales folk, and it's boom or bust there. If you're an engineer that somehow doubles your employers profits, don't dream they'll double your salary, a once-off bonus is the best you can hope for, at the next evaluation cycle.

1. From each, according to his ability. To each, according to "market" rates, and his negotiation skills.

Re: AI is making us work more

#208

Post by godelski » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 6:58 PM UTC

everforward wrote: post #99

Aurornis wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automation is a broad topic. At home I save time because my dishwasher automates washing my dishes. The clothes washer and dryer are a lot easier than doing it by hand. The fruit and vegetable at the grocery store are a lot cheaper than they would be without automation. I think individuals who get comfortable in their jobs don’t like automation arriving at their station because it upends the order of things just as t…

> Your laptop is unquestionably better because it was constructed with the help of automated CNC machines and PCB assembly as opposed to workers manually populating PCBs. This is a fundamentally flawed analogy, because the problems are inverted. CNC and automated PCB assembly work well because creating a process to accurately create the items is hard, but validation that the work is correct is easy. Due to the mechan…

Be careful of Lemon Markets[0]. The problem with them is that they create a stable low quality state. They tend to happen when product quality is not distinguishable at time of purchase.

Which I think we already see a fair amount of this in tech. Even as very tech literate people it can be hard to tell. But companies are definitely pushing to move fast and are willing to trade quality for that. If you're trying to find the minimum quality that a consumer is still willing to pay for, you're likely in a lemon market.

I mean look at Microsoft lately. They can't even get windows 11 right. There's clear quality control issues that are ruining the brand. Enough that us techies are joking that Microsoft is going to bring about the year of Linux, not because Linux has gotten better (also true) but because Microsoft keeps shooting itself in the foot. Or look at Apple with the new AirPods, they sound like shit. Same with Apple intelligence and liquid glass. A big problem (which helps lemon markets come into existence and be stable) is that competition is weak, with a very high barrier to entry. The market is centralized not only because the momentum and size of existing players (still major factor) but because it takes a lot of capital to even attempt to displace them. That's probably more money and more time than the vast majority of investors are willing to risk and the only ones with enough individual wealth are already tied to the existing space.

I think you also have it exactly right about LLMs and AI. A good tool makes failures clear and easy to identify. You design failure modes, even in code! But these machines are designed for human preference. Our methods that optimize for truth, accuracy, and human sounding language simultaneously optimize for deception. You can't penalize the network for wrong outputs if you don't recognize they are wrong.

A final note: you say velocity, I think that's inaccurate. Velocity has direction. It's more accurate to say speed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

Re: AI is making us work more

#209

Post by bakugo » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 7:00 PM UTC

figers wrote: post #205

OptionOfT wrote: post #114

For me, it is making my work miserable. I'm seeing amount of changes needed to produce new features when coding with these AI tools constantly increasing, due to the absence of a proper foundation, and due to the willingness of people to accept it, with the idea that 'we can change it quickly'. It has become acceptable to push those changes in a PR and present them as your own, filled with filler comments that are in…

I reject commits like this, make them re-write it and explain why such and such coding will never be allowed in our code base. Forces the change in coding practice.

> I reject commits like this

Which is a great idea until your superior asks why you're holding back the vibe coders and crippling their 100x productivity by rejecting their PRs instead of just going with the flow.

Re: AI is making us work more

#210

Post by bravetraveler » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 7:03 PM UTC

BeetleB wrote: post #175

Aurornis wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At work, you must be at work doing something else, and the "something else" is seldom a real improvement. If I could automate my job and then go on a hike I'd be a lot more excited about it. When you find an employer that is happy to pay people to not work, let me know because I also want to work there.

> When you find an employer that is happy to pay people to not work, let me know because I also want to work there. This was most employers during COVID :-) I worked fewer hours, and still got more done than most of my team. Since I didn't come to office, no one knew. As long as I responded to emails/messages in a timely fashion, no one cared.

I fail to see the problem! "Time to lean, time to clean" is fine for someone billing/paid by the hour.

As someone on a salary, when the work is finished... I am too. What's overtime? I believe some paperwork had the word 'exempt' on it. My unvested shares are an incentive to save the place from immolation over the next N years. Where's this 'must be at work doing something else' in the contract, again?

"Where's the loyalty?" I hear someone ask. It passed with a family member and employers that had no compassion.

All this to say, I fully support your testing of the water. It's a strategy I've picked up/adapted, too. The poster above should enjoy the time saved by automation/hike. I shitpost.