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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

#61

Post by jader201 »

banannaise wrote: post #39

This 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…

> What's a 20% productivity gain

Where did the 20% number come from? I’d argue it’s way more than that (or variable, i.e. dependent on who’s using it/how it’s being used/what it’s being used on).

Having said that, the number, to me, doesn’t even matter. You could replace that with 200%, and it’d be just as true.

Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration

#62

Post by blakesterz »

I just started using Claude Code for my work as a sysadmin. For my work, it's great. I don't need to wrestle with MySQL joins, claude gets even the most complex ones right WAY faster than I would. Same with new Terraform stuff. Things that would have taken me a day are cut to less than an hour.

So for my work, it's made me much better at my job. Much faster and more accurate.

Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration

#63

Post by data-ottawa »

banannaise wrote: post #39

This 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…

The cynic in me has learned one is measurable and can go on a slide deck, the other is vague and hard to measure.

Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration

#65

Post by ge96 »

banannaise wrote: post #39

This 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…

When I was given a semi-ultimatum "use AI or get fired" kind of thing for writing code I had a brief bout of depression/sadness. Whereas my friend doesn't care/says "I get paid to not work". I have gotten past it, now I'm just like, I'll do what I need to do to get paid since unfortunately I'm in a lot of debt so I need this job. I learned to code in 2013 so I like typing the code myself but now it seems like a waste of time. I still write my own code for myself/hardware hobby.

Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration

#66

Post by mwigdahl »

kstenerud wrote: post #22
epolanski wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wow... Our experiences have been very different, then. I've found each upgrade of Opus to be a noticeable improvement in its complex reasoning and delegation capabilities over its predecessor. To me, this feels in many ways like a technical manager or team lead's job, where I guide the process along using my knowledge and experience, and then let the agent fill in the rest (to the best of its ability). The agent can'…

Same here. The power upgrade going to Fable in particular is quite impressive.

Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration

#67

Post by mullingitover »

banannaise wrote: post #39

This 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…

> customer-service employees who enjoy building relationships but are increasingly expected to supervise AI agents instead.

It sucks for the employees, otoh it might be the only way we're going to beat Baumol's Cost Disease.

In the past few decades productivity has exploded, but service employees have largely failed to increase productivity in any way because it's harder to automate these tasks.

It's the reason the costs of things like education and healthcare are downright extortionate, the reason you're paying back your college well into your fifties, the reason you don't call an ambulance for someone in the US because you don't want to ruin their life financially.

We may have to trade the personal fulfillment in these jobs for the broader affordable access to these services.

Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration

#68

Post by jmuguy »

thewebguyd wrote: post #60
jmuguy wrote: post #43

I 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…

Yeah its hard to deny just the raw throughput from the AI. Like it really is doing work in hours that would take me days.

But those times when I had to drop down into a repl and play around with the output of a method. Or try different ways of doing what anyone else would think is boring, like array manipulation - that's a lot of what I actually LIKE to do.

A big part of me just hopes I can hang in there for another... decade, or two. Then I can retire! Maybe.

Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration

#69

Post by data-ottawa »

blakesterz wrote: post #62

I just started using Claude Code for my work as a sysadmin. For my work, it's great. I don't need to wrestle with MySQL joins, claude gets even the most complex ones right WAY faster than I would. Same with new Terraform stuff. Things that would have taken me a day are cut to less than an hour. So for my work, it's made me much better at my job. Much faster and more accurate.

I don’t know.

I can write a simple query before Claude finishes reading, querying the semantic layer, checking my files, then writes a query that I have to approve, reads the results, hides them (ctrl+o usually works), and gives me a summary.

We’ve reached this inflection point where it’s faster for me to do most tasks again.

I’m sure fast mode costing more money plays a role.

Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration

#70

Post by krapp »

banannaise wrote: post #39

This 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…

Most people don't have the luxury of finding joy and meaning in their work. You aren't hired to have fun, you're hired to create value and wealth for your employer. Just do what literally everyone else does and grind through it until you get a pension and hope it's enough to let you die with a bit of dignity.
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