'Botsitting' -- that word is going into my 2026 lexicon! :-)
Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration
41–50 of 233 posts
Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration
#42I spend at least 6 hours a week arguing with bots owned by other teams, as I’m unable to reach a human before I bypass their bot. 10k person company, clients are paying for my time.
Corpo bullshittery is the best kind of work. Get paid without actually ever doing anything. Its heaven.
Not if you enjoy making things and take pride in your work.
Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration
#43I don't see a lot of talk about how AI development breaks the old feedback loop of write code, watch it run, change it, repeat. I really hate sitting around waiting for the agent to get done planning, reading the plan, then waiting for the agent to get done coding. It's those 5-10 minute windows when its working that really sap my patience and suck all the fun out of our jobs. Writing code by hand is just more fun.
Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration
#44i've seen a number of articles claiming things like "devs self report they'er +x% more productive with AI, but actually they're -y% LESS efficient!". and i think that this is explanation for why. as a boss (or researcher) i'm going to measure productivity based on amount of output per hour that i'm paying you; as a workers, i'm going to measure productivity based on amount of output relative to the amount of effort i…
> so what may be happening is that bosses see that output is at 80% (productivity down!) but workers see that they can give that 80% output with 40% effort (productivity up!).
So why is it that the bosses are the ones that are so enthusiastic about adoption?
Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration
#45I've found that setting good guardrails, and running in a sandbox so that the agent doesn't keep asking tedious permission questions, makes things go a LOT smoother. Generally, I spend anywhere between 15 mins and an hour setting things up (depending on how well the project is set up for AI work), and then set the agent going, coming back in a half-hour to an hour to check its progress. Generally, the tooling keeps i…
It doesn't change the premise. AI should be assisting us, instead it's doing the job and it's us being an assistant to it. This is a monumental shift that people seem to be missing in how knowledge working is changing and it's going beyond mere coding. Guardrails, prompts, whatever, it's us helping it doing the job, not the other way around. Opus 4.6 was the last genuinely good assistant LLM, but since then it's quit…
The problem (okay, one of the problems) with renting other people's models is, as you mentioned, that they can and will change out the model without notifying you ahead of time, and you don't always get to control which model you use. (They might decide to retire it, and you won't be able to get it back if they do).
Which is why (well, part of why) I think the long-term trend will be towards self-hosting models. Right now the frontier models are far enough ahead of the self-hosted ones that there are lots of people willing to pay by the token to rent someone else's model, because they get more value for money from that than from self-hosting models.
But the frontier companies won't be able to keep up their current levels of expenditure forever. At some point the investors are going to say "Hey, so, um, when am I going to see some return on my investment?" and then the current subsidized subscriptions (including the one my employer uses) are going to go away, much like what happened with Copilot this month.
And then the locally-hosted models are going to suddenly look like a more attractive picture. Because where you might have been willing to spend $100/month/employee to rent time on models in someone else's data center, you might suddenly balk at spending $500/month/employee. You might say "Hey, you know what? A $50,000 up-front capital investment is only, what, one month's worth of subscriptions for our 100 employees? Yeah, okay, I'll approve the hardware purchase. Get that self-hosted model set up and then we'll cancel the subscription and switch over."
Not everyone is going to do that. But once the locally-hosted models are good enough, the first few people who do so and report success are going to start a snowball effect. And it will likely be driven by money first, but it will also have the effect, that people will slowly discover, of meaning that you can better predict the model you're using. It will continue to work the same way next year that it is working this year; or if it doesn't, it's because you chose to install the new version.
And when that happens (I'm saying "when", not "if" because although it might take some time, I think it's inevitable in the long run), the frontier-model rental companies are going to struggle to stay afloat. Except for the ones who saw this coming and transitioned to a non-subscription income source somehow (maybe by selling licenses to self-host their frontier models for $$BIGNUM), or who have some other revenue stream besides renting out models.
Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration
#46i've seen a number of articles claiming things like "devs self report they'er +x% more productive with AI, but actually they're -y% LESS efficient!". and i think that this is explanation for why. as a boss (or researcher) i'm going to measure productivity based on amount of output per hour that i'm paying you; as a workers, i'm going to measure productivity based on amount of output relative to the amount of effort i…
Not sure among devs, but I do know that in other positions in typical corporate bureaucracy, people have a propensity to not report their own automations or productivity gains upward, because the reward structure isn't there.
Early on in my days as a sysadmin, I automated a ton of my role when the rest of the team was still doing ClickOps. The reward for doing so was more work and expectations without the additional pay increase to justify my new found productivity. That happens all over the workforce, and so people will just keep it to themselves. I learned my lesson at that first job real fast that if I'm able to have the same, or greater output, for half the time, I keep that to myself so I can use the automation to free up my own time instead of have it filled by the company.
I wonder how much of that is happening now with AI in non-technical roles.
Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration
#47i've seen a number of articles claiming things like "devs self report they'er +x% more productive with AI, but actually they're -y% LESS efficient!". and i think that this is explanation for why. as a boss (or researcher) i'm going to measure productivity based on amount of output per hour that i'm paying you; as a workers, i'm going to measure productivity based on amount of output relative to the amount of effort i…
Not sure among devs, but I do know that in other positions in typical corporate bureaucracy, people have a propensity to not report their own automations or productivity gains upward, because the reward structure isn't there. Early on in my days as a sysadmin, I automated a ton of my role when the rest of the team was still doing ClickOps. The reward for doing so was more work and expectations without the additional…
Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration
#48I've found that setting good guardrails, and running in a sandbox so that the agent doesn't keep asking tedious permission questions, makes things go a LOT smoother. Generally, I spend anywhere between 15 mins and an hour setting things up (depending on how well the project is set up for AI work), and then set the agent going, coming back in a half-hour to an hour to check its progress. Generally, the tooling keeps i…
It doesn't change the premise. AI should be assisting us, instead it's doing the job and it's us being an assistant to it. This is a monumental shift that people seem to be missing in how knowledge working is changing and it's going beyond mere coding. Guardrails, prompts, whatever, it's us helping it doing the job, not the other way around. Opus 4.6 was the last genuinely good assistant LLM, but since then it's quit…
That sounds weirdly gendered even though there's no reason it should be.
Are you getting LLMsplained? :)
Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration
#49It takes years to adapt fully to new tools, and it takes years for the toolmakers to figure out what the tools need to do
This is all normal. It’s also well worth the time spent learning
Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration
#50This really hit home for me: In some cases, workers are also being asked to automate the parts of their jobs they enjoy most, Hinds said on the podcast, pointing to customer-service employees who enjoy building relationships but are increasingly expected to supervise AI agents instead. "That's what gives you joy and meaning at work," she said. "That is very dangerous." What's a 20% productivity gain if I constantly f…
It's like if your career switched from solving puzzles to filling out TPS reports.