Validation is always harder than generation. Writing yourself means building context brick by brick. Reviewing AI means reconstructing someone else's - often broken - logic from zero. Juggling three projects in parallel fragmentizes mental context like a 90s hard drive. After a few hours, more energy goes into task switching and hallucination hunting than actual engineering. Deep work has been replaced by high-speed bot micromanagement
AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it
261–270 of 329 posts
Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it
#262Earlier 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!
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Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it
#263Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
> percentage of good, well planned, consistent and coherent software is going to approach zero So everything stays exactly the same?
> 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.
That's the hidden price of fast development
Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it
#265I 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…
“You never needed 1000s of engineers to build software anyway” What is the point of even mentioning this? We live in reality. In reality, there are countless companies with thousands of engineers making each piece of software. Outside of reality, yes you can talk about a million hypothetical situations. Cherry picking rare examples like Winamp does nothing but provide an example of an exception, which yes, also exist…
IMHO, it's flamebait. Your quoted text is provably false -- e.g., MSFT Windows, AWS, etc. and appeals to idealism of lean project teams.
Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it
#266I 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.
> And Unix was mainly made by two people
Speaking of myths, they were part of a team of 4-5 early contributors with the benefit of network effects via Bell Labs.[0]
Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it
#267This 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.
Why does management turn efficiency gains into higher output quotas? Because competition forced them to. This is a feature of free market capitalism. A single participant can't decide to keep output as is when efficiency improves, because it will lose the competition to those that increase output. Labor organization could be the solution if it was global. Labor organizations that are based in a single country will ju…
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Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think I'll have a happier medium when I get additional inputs set up, such as just talking to a CLI running my full code base on a VPS, but through my phone and airpods, only when it needs help at least I won't be vegetating at a laptop, or shirking other possible responsibilities to get back to a laptop
I’ll never get “I wish I could control it from y phone” types, or “I’ve been working while walking my dog, amazing”. Why would you want to subject yourself to work outside of working hours? The beauty of work laptop is that either I work or I don’t. Laptop open - work time, laptop closed - goodbye, see you on Monday.
It won't be for a work laptop, does that make it easier to understand?
Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
We've gone from "it's glorified auto-complete" to "the quality of working, end-to-end features, is average", in just ~2 years. I think it goes without saying that they will be writing "good code" in short time. I also wonder how much of this "I don't trust them yet" viewpoint is coming from people who are using agents the least. Is it rare that AI one-shots code that I would be willing to raise as a PR with my name o…
I think your kind of missing the point. Think about it from a resource (calorie) expenditure stand point. Are you expending more resources on writing the prompts vs just doing without it? Thats the real question. If you are expending more, which is what Simon is indicating at - are you really better off? Id argue not, given that this cant be sustained for hours on end. Yet the expectation from management might be tha…
I think something a lot of people miss out on is that we're not all the same. We all have different internal thought models, whether it is a biological difference (ADHD brain?), educational differences, and overall abilities. And it seems a lot of people have this idea everyone uses "AI" the same way. That's a lack of lateral thinking. Making assumptions we're all burning "calories" in the same way implies we all think, and work, alike.
We are not alike.
Re: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it
#270Tell that to my family with whom I have been spending a lot more time recently having benefited a lot from increased productivity.
If increased productivity means your output is the same but now you produce it quicker, sure! But lets be honest, this is rarely the case and the “free” time is now filled with more work.
That's not likely to be the fault of AI, that's probably a managerial issue or a personal discipline issue.