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AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it

simonwillison.net

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

#71

Post by co_king_3 »

mentalgear wrote: post #48

I'm also coming to the conclusion that LLMs have basically the same value as when I tried them out with GPT-3 : good for semantic search / debugging. Bad for generation as you constantly have to check it, correct it, and the parts you trust it to get "right" are often those that are biting you afterwards - or if right introduce gaps in your own knowledge that make you slowly inefficient in your "generation controller…

I've been saying since 2024 that these things are not getting meaningfully better at all.

I think these companies have been manipulating social media sentiment for years in order to cover up their bunk product.

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

#72

Post by darkwater »

fhd2 wrote: post #4

I feel agentic development is a time sink. Previously, I'd have an idea, sit on it for a while. In most cases, conclude it's not a good idea worth investing in. If I decided to invest, I'd think of a proper strategy to approach it. With agentic development, I have an idea, waste a few hours chasing it, then switch to other work, often abandoning the thing entirely. I still need to figure out how to deal with that, fo…

> Previously, I'd have an idea, sit on it for a while.

> With agentic development, I have an idea, waste a few hours chasing it,

What's the difference between these 2 periods? Weren't you wasting time when sitting on it and thinking about your idea?

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

#73

Post by digikata »

A couple of historical notes that come to mind.

When washing machines were introduced, the number of hours of doing the chore of laundry did not necessarily decrease until 40 years after the introduction.

When project management software was introduced, it made the task of managing project tasks easier. One could create an order of magnitude or more of detailed plans in the same amount of time - poorly used this decreased the odds of project success, by eating up everyone's time. And the software itself has not moved the needle in terms of project success factors of successfully completing within budget, time, and resources planned.

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

#74

Post by zsoltkacsandi »

9rx wrote: post #56
zsoltkacsandi wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

I didn’t mean the Agile Manifesto prescribes individual productivity measurement. I meant what often happens in “agile in the wild”: we end up tracking throughput proxies (story points completed, velocity, number of tickets closed, burndown charts) and treating that as success, while the harder question (“did this deliver user/business value?”) is weakly measured or ignored.

Also, agile isn’t really “removing managers from the picture” so much as shifting management from command-and-control to enabling constraints, coaching, and removing impediments. Even in Scrum, you still have roles with accountability, and teams still need some form of prioritization and product decision-making (otherwise you just get activity without direction).

So yeah: agile ideals don’t say “measure dev output.” But many implementations incentivize output/throughput, and that’s the misconception I was pointing at.

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

#75

Post by bsenftner »

rtrav wrote: post #52
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.

Don't bet on it. Those managers are the previously loud short sighted thinkers that finagled their way out of coding. Those loud ones are their buddies.

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

#76

Post by co_king_3 »

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?

> So everything stays exactly the same?

No, we get applications so hideously inefficient that your $3000 developer machine feels like it it's running a Pentium II with 256 MB of RAM.

We get software that's as slow as it was 30 years ago, for no reason other than our own arrogance and apathy.

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

#77

Post by zozbot234 »

Flavius wrote: post #69

This intensification is really a symptom of the race to the bottom. It only feels 'exhausting' for people who don't want to lose their job or business to an agent; for everyone else, the AI is just an excuse to do less.

The way you avoid losing your job to an AI agent is not 'intensifying' its use, but learning to drive it better. Much of what people are calling 'intensification' here is really just babysitting and micromanaging their agent because it's perpetually running on vibes and fumes instead of being driven effectively with very long, clearly written (with AI assistance!) prompts and design documents. Writing clear design documentation for your agent is a light, sustainable and even enjoyable activity; babysitting its mistakes is not.

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

#78

Post by bilekas »

gedy wrote: post #15
fhd2 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kills me personally is that I'm constantly 80% there, but the remaining 20% can be just insurmountable. It's really like gambling: Just one more round and it'll be useful, OK, not quite, just one more, for hours.

And let's get real: AI companies will not be satisfied with you paying $20 or even $200 month if you can actually develop your product in a few days with their agents. They are either going to charge a lot more or string you along chasing that 20%.

That's an interesting business model actually : "Oh hey there, I see you're almost finished your project and ready to launch, watch theses adverts and participate in this survey to get the last 10% of your app completed"

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

#79

Post by falloutx »

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…

This is a cope. Managers are not magicians who will finally understand who is good and who is just vibe coding demos. In fact now its gonna become even harder to understand differences for the managers. In fact its more likely that the managers are at the same risk because without a clique of software engineers, they would have nothing to manage.
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