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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

#301

Post by simonw »

cedws wrote: post #285
rybosworld wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI's can self-critique via mechanisms like chain of thought or user specified guard rails like a hook that requires the test suite to pass before a task can be considered complete/ready for human review. These can and do result in higher quality code. Agree that "good code" is vague - it probably always be. But we can still agree that code quality is going up over time without having a complete specification for what…

Unfortunately I can only give anecdotes, but in my experience the LLM's 'thinking' does not lead to code quality improvements in the same way that a programmer thinking for a while would. In my experience having LLMs write Go, it tends to factor code in not so great way from the start, probably due to lacking the mental model of pieces composing together. Furthermore, once a structure is in place, there doesn't seem…

> Furthermore, once a structure is in place, there doesn't seem to be a trigger point that causes the LLM to step back and think about reorganising the code, or how the code it wants to write could be better integrated into what's already there.

Older models did do this, and it sucked. You'd ask for a change to your codebase and they would refactor a chunk of it and make a bunch of other unrelated "improvements" at the same time.

This was frustrating and made for code that was harder to review.

The latest generation of models appear to have been trained not to do that. You ask for a feature, they'll build that feature with the least changes possible to the code.

I much prefer this. If I want the code refactored I'll say to the model "look for opportunities to refactor this" and then it will start suggesting larger changes.

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

#302

Post by [deleted] »

fhd2 wrote: post #4

I feel agentic development is a time sink. Previously, I'd have an idea, sit on it for a while. In most cases, conclude it's not a good idea worth investing in. If I decided to invest, I'd think of a proper strategy to approach it. With agentic development, I have an idea, waste a few hours chasing it, then switch to other work, often abandoning the thing entirely. I still need to figure out how to deal with that, fo…

[deleted]

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

#303

Post by gcanyon »

This has been going on in technology for decades.

   1. New productivity enhancer comes out.
   2. Everyone thinks, "This is it! Work will get shorter|easier as a result of this!"
   3. Instead the work gets faster|more|higher quality and the (time) volume stays roughly the same.
This applies across (almost?) everything: club newsletters that used to take half a day to write out by hand later took half a day to type and lay out with some clip art. It still takes a year or more to make a movie, but now we get Avatar instead of Ice Pirates -- look it up! :-)

When work reduction does happen, it generally happens at a person-quantum level: people hang on to their role until it goes away entirely, and they (hopefully) find something else to do. Rarely is it the case that someone legitimately reduces to part time incrementally as productivity increases.

AI is similar: no doubt jobs will go away as a result, but much less often will AI result in jobs that are easy/part time. For anyone still in the "work" game, even with AI there's still 5x8 hours of work to do.

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

#305

Post by energy123 »

sisnxb wrote: post #253
energy123 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's weird, I'm the opposite. Previously I would start coding immediately, because writing the code helps me figure out the what and the how, and because I'd end up with modular/reusable bits that will be helpful later anyway. Now I sit on an idea for a long time, writing documentation/specs/requirements because I know that the code generation side of things is automated and effortlessly follows from exhaustive req…

I used to do this, but found scoping my agent usage down to smaller chunks got better results than trying to do it all from the get go. And looking back it makes sense - code is the most expressive form we have to tell the computer what to do, not English. The size of the chunk varies heavily on what I’m doing ofc.

How to do that for a complex greenfield project? Do you scope out just one module and let the agent code only that, with the intention of reusing that module later in the full project?

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

#306

Post by throwup238 »

rkomorn wrote: post #219
throwup238 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder how people who work in CAD, media editing, or other "heavy" workloads etc, feel. I’d let you know how I feel but I’m too busy restarting Solidworks after its third crash of the day. I pay thousands a year for the privilege.

Well that's sad to hear. Also kinda makes me glad I didn't wander down the path of learning Solidworks during the pandemic.

It's usually pretty stable for a while. It's when you get into very complex parts and assembles that it starts to really show problems. (You'll still see some crashes learning though).

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

#307

Post by jauntywundrkind »

cedws wrote: post #298
jmalicki wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A programmer might write a function, notice it becoming too long or doing too much, and then decide break it down into smaller subroutines. I've never seen an LLM really do this, they seem biased towards being additive. The nice thing is a programmer with an LLM just steps in here, and course-corrects, and still has that value add, without taking all the time to write the boilerplate in between. And in general, the…

>The nice thing is a programmer with an LLM just steps in here, and course-corrects This does not seem to be the direction things are going. People are talking about shipping code they haven't edited, most notably the author of Claude Code. Sometimes they haven't even read the code at all. With LLMs the path of least resistance is to take your hands off the wheel completely. Only programmers taking particular care ar…

> When the code is constructed by an LLM, the human in the driving seat doesn't get a chance to build the mental models that they usually would writing it manually

I'm asking the LLM for alternatives and options constantly, to test different models. It can give me a write-up description of options, or go spin up subagents to go try 4 different things at once.

> It is widely considered to be harder to read code than to write it

Even more than writing code, I think LLM's are exceptional at reading code. They can review huge amounts of code incredibly fast, to understand very complex systems. And then you can just ask it questions! Don't understand? Ask more questions!

I have mcp-neovim-server open, so I just ask it to open the relevant pieces of code at those lines, and it can then show me. CodeCompanion makes it easy to ask questions about a line. It's amazing how

Reading code was one of the extremely hard parts of programming, and the machine is far far better at it than us!

> When the code is constructed by an LLM, the human in the driving seat doesn't get a chance to build the mental models that they usually would writing it manually.

Here's one way to tell me you haven't tried the thing without saying you haven't tried the thing. The ability to do deep inquiry into topics & to test &btry different models is far far far better than it has ever been. We aren't stuck with what we right, we can keep iterating &b trying at vastly lower cost, to do the hard work to discover what is a good model. Programmers rarely have had the luxury of time and space to keep working on a problem again and again, to adjust and change and tweak until the architecture truly sings. Now you can try a weeks worth of architectures in an afternoon. There is no better time for those who want to understand to do so.

I feel like one thing missing from this thread is that most people adopting AI at a serious level are building really strong AGENTS.md files, that refine tastes and practices and forms. The AI is pretty tasteless, isnt deliberate. It is up to us to explore the possibility space when working on problems, and to create good context that steers towards good solutions. And our ability to get information out, to probe into systems, to asses, to test hypothesis, is vastly vastly higher, which we can keep using to become far better steersfolk.

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

#308

Post by mcny »

ttoinou wrote: post #277
mcny wrote: post #120

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 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.

The point is we have to fight for better working conditions, not just for ourselves but for our coworkers and future generations.

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

#309

Post by darkwater »

fhd2 wrote: post #290
darkwater wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know, and letting an agent/LLM "think" about some ideas does not waste your time either. Yes, it "wastes" energy and you need to read and think about the results after, we don't have neural interfaces to computer, so the inner thinking feedback loop will always be faster. But I keep thinking GP comment was unfair: you can just have your idea in the background to check whether it is good or not exactly the same, and…

It's not a complaint about LLMs, it's a complaint about my own behaviour. Maybe I didn't make that clear enough. Maybe like one of the siblings said, I just shouldn't jump right into execution even if that barrier has been lowered. But it sure is tempting for me.

I understand you, and I felt the same for a few days: the dopamine rush was hitting hard. You just need to control it (with a very big "just"), like any other dopamine rush.

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

#310

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

elicash wrote: post #282
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unions are labour cartels for the purpose of extracting above-market wages from the commons, a sort of mafia. They are incompatible with capitalism and libertarianism, especially with libertarianism.

By this logic, every corporation is a cartel to extract below-market wages from the commons. Both sides are bargaining collectively. And so you'd be saying both are incompatible with libertarianism. There are strands of libertarian thought, I suppose, where government shouldn't be incorporating businesses at all. But it's still legit to say libertarianism is compatible with corporations and with labor unions.

> By this logic, every corporation is a cartel to extract below-market wages from the commons.

This statement makes only sense if you don't know what markets are, how they work and what their purpose is.

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