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Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration
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Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration
#52I'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…
I think this is just a misunderstanding of how most technology has always worked?
Consider what is happening in most construction sites. The heavy work is absolutely from the technology on site. But without people there to oversee it and keep it working, it would fail.
And that is almost certainly true at any industrial site. Indeed, look up videos of high tech looms. A large portion of the technology added to them are so that the operators can locate the fault and fix it.
Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration
#53I 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.
I don't mind the workflow since I'll spawn new agent sessions in new terminal tabs until my attention is saturated by round-robin'ing through them.
It's actually kinda pleasant, especially when I consider all the tickets I'm not excited about doing. It's prob worth focusing on that aspect of it.
Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
I kind of enjoy exploring black boxes, trying how different inputs are mapping to differences in outputs. It's kind of like hacking. The problem is, they keep altering the box.
The box is stochastic by design, and has an untraceable amount of complexity between its context and output by nature. It may be fun to look at inputs and outputs, but it's not hackable and trying to map one into the other is more like astrology than a science.
It's copromancy. Picking through the clanker's doings in an attempt to predict the future.
Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I kind of enjoy exploring black boxes, trying how different inputs are mapping to differences in outputs. It's kind of like hacking. The problem is, they keep altering the box.
The box is stochastic by design, and has an untraceable amount of complexity between its context and output by nature. It may be fun to look at inputs and outputs, but it's not hackable and trying to map one into the other is more like astrology than a science.
No but you see, I have a system! /s
(I spent too long by the horse racing track)
Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
The box is stochastic by design, and has an untraceable amount of complexity between its context and output by nature. It may be fun to look at inputs and outputs, but it's not hackable and trying to map one into the other is more like astrology than a science.
It's copromancy. Picking through the clanker's doings in an attempt to predict the future.
Thanks, you taught me a new word today! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scatomancy
Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration
#57My challenge has been trying to manage my higher-level context. I've gotten a pretty good setup where I have project-level orchestrator agents that can spin up workers to implement tasks with minimal oversight, and the resulting work is usually quite good (especially after I give it the mandatory "make the comments less verbose" refining, etc.). But that means I'm doing even more context-switching. I've gotten to the point where I have a half-dozen draft PRs that just need my review before I tag my colleagues, and trying to dig up the context from all of those tasks can be paralyzing.
Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration
#58I'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…
Your experience pretty much mirrors my own. I hate to be the 'they're holding it wrong' guy but there's certainly a lot of people out there that have no real idea how to effectively leverage AI.
That’s a problem with the tool not the people. AI is marketed literally as writing one sentence and having some app perfectly output. Just check any of the landing pages for Claude code or codex or GitHub copilot…
Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration
#59This kind of reminds me of an article that I saw on HN ages back, there's like a subset of office workers who automated their Excel jobs, and just show up to work, read books, and do literally anything, while Excel does their work for them, and they collect their paycheck.
Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration
#60I 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.
> Writing code by hand is just more fun.
This is something that I don't see discussed a lot in these conversations, but its true for a ton of folks.
I didn't end up with a career in tech because I wanted to tell a bot to do the fun part of my job for me, leaving me only with the boring tedious parts. I didn't sign up to be a full time code reviewer, and I certainly never wanted to be a manager, yet alone a manager of bots.
It also can't help but spark feelings of "Why am I getting paid 6 figures for this??" and that makes me nervous for the future.
I imagine the engineers and assemblers in factories pre-assembly line felt the same when things started getting automated there. There's an element of craftsmanship that gets taken away as the product moves from being artisanal, hand crafted to mass produced.
I wonder if its too late for me to pivot to hardware