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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

#271

Post by jillesvangurp »

FeteCommuniste wrote: post #131
jillesvangurp wrote: post #126

That'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. The whole notion is based on a closed world assumption, which is always a bad assumption. You might be right, but some of us haven't quite warmed to the idea that our new job description will be something like "high-level planner and bot-wrangler," with nary a line of code in sight.

Change can be upsetting. Compilation used to be done by people. People used to write assembler for a living. Entire languages like Cobol, Fortran, Smalltalk came and went. You might still find paid (well paid even) work doing these things of course but it's a bit niche at this point. Things like Cobol are not likely to be picked for new projects. And unless you work in a museum, anything involving punch cards is probably not a thing anymore. There are a lot of professions that were common fifty years ago that no longer aren't.

I get that people are emotional about change impacting them; and maybe still a bit in denial even. But regardless how people feel, it's probably not going to majorly change the outcome. What I sketched in my earlier comment is that it is maybe not as black and white as jobs disappearing and everybody being out of work. AI tools require people with programming skills to be most effective. That points to a change of the type of work.

Some might resent that and give up or maybe try to stick to their current gigs for as long as they last. I don't think this is all changing overnight. But on a scale of a few years, it's going to impact the job market quite a bit.

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

#272

Post by lackerloser »

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!

[dead]

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

#273

Post by veunes »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #126

That'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…

The problem isn't the abstraction level, it's the loss of the incubation period. Moving from Assembly to C didn't remove the need to think through data structures. Prompt engineering, however, triggers skipping the reflection stage entirely. Constantly managing bots leaves zero bandwidth for the "are we building garbage?" question. AI scales typing speed, not the speed of architectural decision-making

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

#274

Post by falloutx »

cedws wrote: post #92
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…

I’m finding that the code LLMs produce is just average. Not great, not terrible. Which makes sense, the model is basically a complex representation of the average of its training data right? If I want what I consider ‘good code’ I have to steer it. So I wouldn’t use LLMs to produce significant chunks of code for something I care about. And publishing vibe coded projects under my own GitHub user feels like it devalues…

I was literally creating a 2nd account on github today for this purpose.

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

#275

Post by ttoinou »

FeteCommuniste wrote: post #118
ttoinou wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s called the market. If you can compete while providing better life balance, go ahead and compete with those bad companies

It's called the market. If you can compete while not employing eight year olds on your assembly lines and dumping carcinogens in the river, go ahead and compete with those bad companies.

We had it good as software developers. Now, we can't be just code monkeys anymore.. Don't be mad. It's just the way it works.

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

#276

Post by ttoinou »

co_king_3 wrote: post #128
ttoinou wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s called the market. If you can compete while providing better life balance, go ahead and compete with those bad companies

It's called the market. Get back to work, slave.

We are more slaves to governments and tax authorities than companies we work for

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

#277

Post by ttoinou »

mcny wrote: post #120
ttoinou wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s called the market. If you can compete while providing better life balance, go ahead and compete with those bad companies

> It’s called the market. If you can compete while providing better life balance, go ahead and compete with those bad companies With friends like you, who needs enemies? Imagine if we said that about everything. Go ahead and start a garment factory with unlocked exit doors and see if you can compete against these bad garment companies. Go ahead and start your own coal mines that pay in real money and not funny money…

Working conditions have always been way worse than what we have in 2026. Our ancestors didn't have it good.

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

#278

Post by gamblor956 »

thunky wrote: post #194
FieryTransition wrote: post #192

Earlier 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.

Not today's programmers, no.

The side effect of a massively increased programmer labor population is that the average skill of the group plummeted.

But back then? Most programmers would not have tried but a substantial portion would have been able to if they did.

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

#279

Post by cedws »

rybosworld wrote: post #206
cedws wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m finding that the code LLMs produce is just average. Not great, not terrible. Which makes sense, the model is basically a complex representation of the average of its training data right? If I want what I consider ‘good code’ I have to steer it. So I wouldn’t use LLMs to produce significant chunks of code for something I care about. And publishing vibe coded projects under my own GitHub user feels like it devalues…

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…

First you have to classify what “good code” is, something that programmers have still not settled on in the over half a century that the field has existed. I also think what the other reply said is true, going from average to “good code” is way harder because it implies a need for LLMs to self critique beyond what they do today. I don’t think just training on a set of hand picked samples is enough.

There’s also the knowledge cutoff aspect. I’ve found that LLMs often produce outdated Go code that doesn’t utilise the modern language features. Or for cases where it knows about a commonly used library, it uses deprecated methods. RAG/MCP can kind of paper over this problem but it’s still fundamental to LLMs until we have some kind of continuous training.

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

#280

Post by level09 »

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…

I see it differently.

for me AI has been less about building more/fast, and more about unlocking potential that was always out of reach.

Knowledge gaps that would've taken years to fill, new angles I wouldn't have thought to explore on my own. It's not that it makes more software.

it just makes you more capable of tackling things you couldn't before.

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