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The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers

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Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers

#41

Post by mynameisash »

sumeno wrote: post #7
kakacik wrote: post #3

Somebody doesnt know how to regulate their pace, and then various burnout symptoms happen. Not everybody pushes themselves like that, nor should, its anything but healthy and sustainable. In my experience it takes... rather obsessed people, ocd or similar traits, maybe 2 out of 10 intensity of their disease. Highly functional, smart, yet unbalanced. Llms just allow this spiral to go further, while human limits remain…

Given the research cited in the article it seems bigger than an anecdote about one guy who doesn't know how to do work life balance 70%+ saying that AI has increased their workload AND that they are burning out because is it.

Yeah, it's all well and good to say somebody doesn't know how to regulate their pace, and it's another thing for your manager to tell your team that you need to be using a squad of agents constantly. To have a weekly stand-up that is specifically and solely for the purpose of talking about your "AI wins" for the week. To be told that you will be evaluated on how much you're using AI for your job.

When your manager and your company regulate your pace for you with the understood threat that not using AI will risk your job, you don't really have much of an option.

Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers

#42

Post by ok_dad »

I love it. I was getting burnt out due to ADHD or autism burnout but with AI tooling I’m able to work a full week without burnout. I think the kind of burnout I get is helped with these tools, but since I’m not neurotypical it’s different from the burnout people are getting from doing too much.

I do see “task expansion” happening often though. If I can do the full feature rather than doing baby steps I’ll often do that now, because wrangling code is easier.

Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers

#43

Post by pants2 »

zthrowaway wrote: post #15

Can definitely attest to this. The frequency of outages at my company have increased drastically the past year, especially ever since incorporating agentic development. I’m seeing all of the dev best practices go out the window. We have a few vibe coders that are posting 15-30 PR’s per day. It’s way too much for us to review. We’re not a big shop. I think we’re going to have to hire more people just to review code ac…

I really think that software in general is getting buggier, with ChatGPT/Claude being some of the buggiest software I use. I constantly run into quality issues there and I've reported at least a dozen bugs to ChatGPT this year. One kicker I found recently was that Codex PR Reviews, once turned on for a repo, cannot be turned off - I got escalated to engineering who confirmed that they forgot to add a feature to disable code reviews.

Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers

#44

Post by ricketycricket »

PradeetPatel wrote: post #33
zthrowaway wrote: post #15

Can definitely attest to this. The frequency of outages at my company have increased drastically the past year, especially ever since incorporating agentic development. I’m seeing all of the dev best practices go out the window. We have a few vibe coders that are posting 15-30 PR’s per day. It’s way too much for us to review. We’re not a big shop. I think we’re going to have to hire more people just to review code ac…

The proposed industry solution is to use agents to review PRs, as not to slow down the velocity of delivery... My current workplace is going through a major "realignment" exercise to replace as many testers with agents as humanely possible, which proved to be a challenge when the existing process is not well documented.

"Hey Claude, did Claude do a good job?"

Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers

#46

Post by bensyverson »

dwattttt wrote: post #35
bensyverson wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the PR workflow is just unsustainable in the agentic era. Rather than review every new feature or bug fix, we would depend on good test coverage, and hold developers accountable for what they ship. The result might be more faulty code getting merged, but if you already have outages and can't review every PR, is there currently a meaningful benefit to the PR workflow?

This is the "if you're already letting faults through, why not give up trying to stop faults?" approach.

The alternative might be "what if we could get the genie back into the bottle?"

We know some people are using LLMs to evaluate PRs, the only question is who, and how strong the incentive is for them to give up.

Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers

#47

Post by gdulli »

mynameisash wrote: post #41
sumeno wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the research cited in the article it seems bigger than an anecdote about one guy who doesn't know how to do work life balance 70%+ saying that AI has increased their workload AND that they are burning out because is it.

Yeah, it's all well and good to say somebody doesn't know how to regulate their pace, and it's another thing for your manager to tell your team that you need to be using a squad of agents constantly. To have a weekly stand-up that is specifically and solely for the purpose of talking about your "AI wins" for the week. To be told that you will be evaluated on how much you're using AI for your job. When your manager an…

That sounds horrible. I'm so glad I saved enough money to retire early right before this madness started.

Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers

#48

Post by wfme »

aetherspawn wrote: post #16

… how are you getting actual usable output at that scale? I have to baby my AI in 1 minute increments or it just doesn’t arrive at the correct solution at all. Using Codex 5.2

Perhaps the prompts you are using could do with some love. We're pretty consistently getting great results up to and beyond the 10 minute mark in a large monorepo.

We tend to use Opus 4.6 High and GPT 5.4 High.

Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers

#49

Post by strange_quark »

ed_balls wrote: post #36
strange_quark wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, why do you think people are burning out?

Due to prolonged stress, which lack of control is the main contributor e.g. you have expectations, you cannot control variable x,y,z, which leads to stress, which over long period of causes burn out.

In case it wasn’t obvious, I was being facetious. You can’t just let the AI rip without putting effort into constructing good input and verifying the output and expect anything good to happen, which is what the gp was asking.

There’s no secret into how people are getting “10x”, or at least claiming to, they’re just working more.

Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers

#50

Post by zthrowaway »

Madmallard wrote: post #38
zthrowaway wrote: post #15

Can definitely attest to this. The frequency of outages at my company have increased drastically the past year, especially ever since incorporating agentic development. I’m seeing all of the dev best practices go out the window. We have a few vibe coders that are posting 15-30 PR’s per day. It’s way too much for us to review. We’re not a big shop. I think we’re going to have to hire more people just to review code ac…

Sounds like people need to speak up to management

Management likes how fast features are getting deployed so they essentially told us to just deal with it.
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