Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 329 posts

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

#51

Post by Noaidi »

40 years ago when I was a history major in college one of my brilliant professors gave us a book to read called "the myth of domesticity".

In the book The researcher explains that when washing machines were invented the women faced a whole new expectation of clean clothes all the time because washing clothes was much less of a labor. And statistics pointed out that women actually were washing clothes more often than doing more work after the washing machine was invented then before.

This happens with any technology. AI is no different.

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

#52

Post by rtrav »

bsenftner wrote: post #36

I've been saying this since ChatGPT first came out: AI enables the lazy to dig intellectual holes they cannot dig out, while also enables those with active critical analysis and good secondary considerations to literally become the fabled 10x or more developer / knowledge worker. Which creates interesting scenarios as AI is being evaluated and adopted: the short sighted are loudly declaring success, which will be sho…

Surely managers will finally recognize the contributions of the quiet ones! I cannot believe what I read here.

We just saw the productivity growth in the vibe coded GitHub outages.

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

#53

Post by antupis »

zsoltkacsandi wrote: post #45
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…

Completely agree. There is a common misunderstanding/misconception in product development, that more features = better product. I’ve never seen a product/project manager questioning themselves: does this feature add any value? Should we remove it? In agile methodologies we measure the output of the developers. But we don’t care about that the output carries any meaningful value to the end user/business.

It’s more about operational resilience and serving customers than product development. If you run early WhatsApp like organisation just 1 person leaving can create awful problems. Same for serving customers especially big clients need all kinds of reports and resources that skeleton organisation can not provide.

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

#54

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

singularfutur wrote: post #10

This 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.

The leftist thought process never ceases to amaze me:

"This time, its going to be the correct version of socialism."

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

#55

Post by mrtksn »

taosx wrote: post #17
mrtksn wrote: post #8

Computer languages were the lathe for shaping the machines to make them do whatever we want, AI is a CNC. Another abstraction layer for making machines do whatever we want them to do.

I don't disagree with the concept of AI being another abstraction layer (maybe) but I feel that's an insult to a CNC machine which is a very precise and accurate tool.

LLMs are quite accurate for programming, these days they almost always create a code that will compile without errors and errors are almost always fixable by feeding the error into the LLM. I would say this is extremely precise text generation, much better than most humans.

Just like with CNC though, you need to feed it with the correct instructions. It's still on you for the machined output to do the expected thing. CNC's are also not perfect and their operators need to know the intricacies of machining.

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

#56

Post by 9rx »

zsoltkacsandi wrote: post #45
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…

Completely agree. There is a common misunderstanding/misconception in product development, that more features = better product. I’ve never seen a product/project manager questioning themselves: does this feature add any value? Should we remove it? In agile methodologies we measure the output of the developers. But we don’t care about that the output carries any meaningful value to the end user/business.

> I’ve never seen a product/project manager questioning themselves: does this feature add any value? Should we remove it?

To be fair, it is a hard question to contend with. It is easier to keep users who don't know what they're missing happier than users who lost something they now know they want. Even fixing bugs can sometimes upset users who have come to depend on the bug as a feature.

> In agile methodologies we measure the output of the developers.

No we don't. "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools". You are bound to notice a developer with poor output as you interact with them, but explicitly measure them you will not. Remember, agile is all about removing managers from the picture. Without managers, who is even going to do the measuring?

There are quite a few pre-agile methodologies out there that try to prepare a development team to operate without managers. It is possible you will find measurement in there, measuring to ensure that the people can handle working without mangers? Even agile itself recognizes in the 12 principles that it requires a team of special people to be able to handle agile.

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

#57

Post by manuelmoreale »

wiseowise wrote: post #20

> I've had conversations with people recently who are losing sleep because they're finding building yet another feature with "just one more prompt" irresistible. Literal work junkies. And what’s the point? If you’re working on your own project then “just one more feature, bro” isn’t going to make next Minecraft/Photopea/Stardew Valley/name your one man wonder. If you’re working for someone, then you’re a double fool,…

There's a word for that mindset: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karoshi

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

#58

Post by falloutx »

pousada wrote: post #43
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…

> percentage of good, well planned, consistent and coherent software is going to approach zero So everything stays exactly the same?

I get this comment everytime I say this but there are levels to this. What you think is bad today could be considered artisan when things become worse than today.

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

#60

Post by co_king_3 »

co_king_3 wrote: post #49
mrtksn wrote: post #8

Computer languages were the lathe for shaping the machines to make them do whatever we want, AI is a CNC. Another abstraction layer for making machines do whatever we want them to do.

AI is one of those early-2000s SUVs that gets 8 miles to the gallon and has a TV screen in the back of every seat. It's about presenting externally as a "bad ass" while: A) Constantly drowning out every moment of your life with low quality background noise. B) Aggressively polluting the environment and depleting our natural resources for no reason beyond pure arrogance.

I feel that the popularization of bloated UI "frameworks", like React and Electron, coupled with the inefficiency tolerated in the "JS ecosystem" have been precursors to this dynamic.

It seems perfectly fitting to me that Anthropic is using a wildly overcomplicated React renderer in their TUI.

React devs are the perfect use case for "AI" dev tools. It is perfectly tolerated for them to write highly inefficient code, and these frameworks are both:

A) Arcane and inconsistently documented

B) Heavily overrepresented in open-source

Meaning there are meaningful gains to be had from querying these "AI" tools for framework development.

In my opinion, the shared problem is the acceptance of egregious inefficiency.

Post reply on HN