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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

#241

Post by cube00 »

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.

The way Simon offers to send you less content if you sign up for the paid newsletter always made me suspicious that goal could be to overwhelm on purpose.

You feel like you should pay for the curated feed so you won't miss the really important advances in the firehose of content that's pumped out.

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

#242

Post by simonw »

windexh8er wrote: post #204
simonw wrote: post #193

Earlier 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…

My major open source projects get a lot of use. I wouldn't classify them as "just random things".

I don't think you're familiar with my work at all.

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

#243

Post by tzury »

simonw wrote: post #196
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

Impressive indeed. Was not aware. The comments below all flagged.

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

#244

Post by simonw »

cube00 wrote: post #241
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. The way Simon offers to send you less content if you sign up for the paid newsletter always made me suspicious that goal could be to overwhelm on purpose. You feel like you should pay for the curated feed so you won't miss the really important advances in the firehose of content that's pumped out.

Haha, worst business model ever. I'm going to write things daily so people will pay me to write less!

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

#245

Post by thunky »

eqvinox wrote: post #234
thunky wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 '…

Agree completely. Where I'm optimistic about AI is that it can also help identify poorly written code (even it's own code), and it can help rewrite it to be better quality. Average developers can't do this part.

From what I've found it's very easy to ask the AI to look at code and suggest how to make the code maintainable (look for SRP violations, etc, etc). And it will go to work. Which means that we can already build this "quality" into the initial output via agent workflows.

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

#246

Post by RAMJAC »

co_king_3 wrote: post #209
RAMJAC wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The guy is a troll. LLM coding posts are flame bait now.

I'm not trolling. You're peeved that you don't have a rebuttal.

Who said I was peeved. You are trolling. We all have a better use of our time than this.

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

#247

Post by 9rx »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #54
singularfutur wrote: post #10

This is not a technology problem. AI intensifies work because management turns every efficiency gain into higher output quotas. The solution is labor organization, not better software.

The leftist thought process never ceases to amaze me: "This time, its going to be the correct version of socialism."

Labor organization is the solution on the right. The left believes in regulation.

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

#248

Post by sph »

simonw wrote: post #145
sph wrote: post #130

Is a blog reposting other content worth its own post? Previous discussion of the original article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945755

In this case I don't think so. My post here even links back to the original Hacker News conversation from the "via" link.

the circular economy of AI

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

#249

Post by [deleted] »

simonw wrote: post #244
cube00 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don’t have to keep churning out multiple blog posts a day, every day. The way Simon offers to send you less content if you sign up for the paid newsletter always made me suspicious that goal could be to overwhelm on purpose. You feel like you should pay for the curated feed so you won't miss the really important advances in the firehose of content that's pumped out.

Haha, worst business model ever. I'm going to write things daily so people will pay me to write less!

[deleted]

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

#250

Post by 9rx »

bckr wrote: post #65
singularfutur wrote: post #10

This is not a technology problem. AI intensifies work because management turns every efficiency gain into higher output quotas. The solution is labor organization, not better software.

Labor organization yes! I don't quite know how to achieve it. I also worry that my desire to become a manager is in direct conflict with my desire to contribute to labor organization. On a separate note, I have the intensification problem in my personal work as well. I sit down to study, but, first, let me just ask Claude to do some research in the background... Oh, and how is my Cursor doing on the dashboard? Ah, ri…

> I also worry that my desire to become a manager is in direct conflict with my desire to contribute to labor organization.

Nah. You can definitely do both. A labor organization of any meaningful size needs management. A labor union is effectively a business in its own right, after all. Some unions even opt to register as corporations, and some unions even see unions rise up to protect workers from the larger union!

And certainly a tech union, to be effective, would have to be humongous given how easy it is to move the work around.

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