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AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it
231–240 of 329 posts
Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
So race to the bottom where you work more and make less per unit of work? Great deal, splendid idea. The only winners here are CEOs/founders who make obscene money, liquidate/retire early while suckers are on the infinite treadmill justifying their existence.
You're describing all technological advances. I can harvest crops by hand, but a machine can do it 100x faster. I'm not paid 100x though so it's a bad deal - destroy the machines. The real advantage now that code is cheaper to write is who can imagine the best product. I'm happy to compete at that level.
Thank you for proving the point for me. Productivity goes up, 70% of people are fired and salary barely grows up. Amazing deal.
https://ers.usda.gov/sites/default/files/_laserfiche/publica...
> The real advantage now that code is cheaper to write is who can imagine the best product. I'm happy to compete at that level.
I’d probably be as happy as you, if I had such big ego.
Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think I'm missing the point and respectfully, I think your reply is completely unrelated to anything that I said. Whether you are "better off or not" is a separate topic, and I never suggested one way or the other. Simon's point is that engineers can be so productive with these tools that it is tempting to work (much) longer.
Simon: "I'm frequently finding myself with work on two or three projects running parallel. I can get so much done, but after just an hour or two my mental energy for the day feels almost entirely depleted." Youre a time waster, stop posting and creating noise.
Time wasting would be not reading the comment I replied to, and then thinking I was replying to Simon/the article.
Does that sound familiar?
Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Sorry but a 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.
The problem is that that's the same skill required to safely use AI tools. You need to essentially audit its output, ensure that you have a sensible and consistent design (either supplied as input or created by the AI itself), and 'refine' the prompts as needed.
AI does not make poor engineers produce better code. It does make poor engineers produce better-looking code, which is incredibly dangerous. But ultimately, considering the amount of code written by average engineers out there, it actually makes perfect sense for AI to be an average engineer — after all, that's the bulk of what it was trained on! Luckily, there's some selection effect there since good work propagates more, but that's a limited bias at best.
Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it
#235Over the past month, with vibe-coding, I've:
* Made Termux accessible enough for me to use.
* Made an MUD client for Emacs.
Gotten Emacs and Emacspeak working on Termux.
Gotten XFCE to run with Orca and AT-SPI communicating to make the desktop environment accessible.
None of this would have happened without AI. Of course, it's only useful for a few people that are blind, use Android, and love Linux and Emacs and such. But it's improved my life a ton. I can do actual work on my phone. I've got Org-mode, calendar, Org-journal, desktop chromium, ETC. all on my phone. And if AI dies tomorrow, I'll still have it. The code is all there for me to learn from, tweak, and update.
I just use one agent, Codex. I don't do the agent swarms yet.
Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a big enough dataset of 'good' code to train from though?
I (and lots of people) used to think the models would run out of training data and it would halt progress. They did run out of human-authored training data (depending on who you ask), in 2024/2025. And they still improve.
> And they still improve.
But what asymptote are they approaching? Average code? Good code? Great code?
Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it
#237That's the bane of all productivity increasing tools, any time you free up immediately gets consumed by more work. People keep on making the same naive assumption that the total amount of work is a constant when you mess with the cost of that work. The reality is that if you make something cheaper, people will want more of it. And it adds up to way more than what was asked before. That's why I'm not worried about los…
> That's why I'm not worried about losing my job.
Right. Because the demand for hand-written code will be high enough that you will keep your job?
Or did you mean that you expect to lose the current job (writing software) and have a new job (directing an agent to write software)?
You really expect to get paid the same doing a low-skill job (directing an agent) as you did the high-paid one (writing software)?
After all, your examples
> If you look at the history of computers and software engineering including compilers, ci/cd, frameworks/modules/etc. functional and OO programming paradigms, type inference, etc. There's something new every few years. Every time we make something easier and cheaper, demand goes up and the amount of programmers increases.
Were all, with the exception of the invention of high-level languages, an increase in skill requirements from the practitioners, not a decrease in skill requirements.
Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a big enough dataset of 'good' code to train from though?
I (and lots of people) used to think the models would run out of training data and it would halt progress. They did run out of human-authored training data (depending on who you ask), in 2024/2025. And they still improve.
> They did run out of human-authored training data (depending on who you ask), in 2024/2025. And they still improve.
It seemed to me that improvements due to training (i.e. the model) in 2025 were marginal. The biggest gains were in structuring how the conversation with the LLM goes.
Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it
#239People are a gas, and they expand to fill the space they're in. Tools that produce more work do make people's lives easier, they mean an individual just needs to do more work using their tools to do so. This is a disposition that most people have, and therefore it's unavoidable. AI is not exciting to me. I only need to use it so I don't fall behind my peers. Why would I ever be interested in that?
"Word expands to fill the time available"
Bad typo there "work expands to fill the time available"
Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 i…
If we revisit these posts in a week, a month and then a year my question is: was it useful? Are others building off of this, still? My is answer right now is: you can't answer that question yet and the fact that you are looking for immediate validation showcases you're just building random things. Which is great if that's what you want to do. But is it truly novel or compelling? Given you just move on to the next thi…
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