YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Unfortunately this means that you always feel the need to keep building or fall behind (picturing Lucy and Ethel at the chocolate factory) which means you’re pretty much always feeling burnt out and it feels harder to step away than ever before without feeling a certain way about it.

I hate it. It’s the best time ever to build. That excitement lasted about a year - but now it’s a treadmill I can’t escape and companies are not really paying more for the productivity (even factoring in the cost of my AI usage)

Realistically there were only ever two possible outcomes: you do more work for the same amount of money, or you’re one of the ones who were laid off and your work was transferred to the former.

The only way it will result in less work and the same or better quality of life is if you’re self-employed or are employed by a compassionate human. Sadly that does not apply to the majority of people.

Want to do less work? Join a union and campaign for a 4-day work week or something. If the productivity benefit from AI is real, there's no reason you shouldn't be paid the same for less time because your output is the same/better.

(1) More tech doesn't save time if it's developed in the direction/dimension of more information flow. Because it seems that the best environment for creativity is a somewhat restricted environment of information. And if one needs to engage with information to take advantage of this new tech, it actually impedes creativity.

(2) A lot of the grunt work that we seem to be automating also encourages creativity. From what I've observed from many artists and programmers (I hang out with both), it seems that creativity strikes best when it's not forced, and the "downtime" doing grunt work actually accelerates it.

So I think that AI breaks these two principles (minimal information and the removal of the crucial grunt work), and actually makes us work more for less.

The only gains seem to be those short-term kinds (a program can be made faster, rewards can be reaped by senior people who have thought about stuff for a while), rather than encouraging a healthy environment of creativity....

So on average I would say I'm getting about as much work done now as before ai.

The way to better leverage this is to build your own company, I know this is not as simple as saying it but the gap is widening and it doesn't look good for employees.

"The pitch was that AI would give us our time back. Write less boilerplate, delegate the boring parts, go home earlier."

Who pitched this? Where was this argued?

And for what it's worth, our entire industry was pitched as a way for businesses to do more with less. Our raison d'être is that we would automate and enhance parts of business so you no longer need the rooms of analysts, the constant inventory manpower churn, rooms of typists, mailrooms, and on and on and on.

It's a bit rich for us to clutch pearls now. We exist as an industry to put other people out of work, and many of us have made a lot of money doing just that. There is zero surprise that businesses would like to put us out of work if they could.

And even among our industry, many of us spent much of our time trying to reduce the need for other programmers. Doesn't the website builder maker put web developers out of business? Framework vendors are replacing lots of internal code that could keep big teams employed for decades! Microsoft and other big firms are constantly trying to figure out what the many employers of software dev teams are doing...so they can replace them. I mean, we all do that, trying to automate and simplify the need for other teams to exist.

The "pitch" of AI is that it's a new tool that your competitors are going to be using, so you had better get onboard now too, in a classic adapt or die choice. And...this is largely true! You can't argue it away. You can mythologize a never existed history where software used to be perfect in the pre-AI era. You can't moralize about slop or pretend it's all a mirage. It's all just foolish rhetoric that groups all cluck and upvote to make each other feel good, while the rest of the world moves on.

So the result is noticeably worse, but you basically must do it, because the efficiency gains are inescapable. This makes the work seem even more pointless, adding to the feeling that you're working more and accomplishing less.

I switched to a dumb flip phone as my primary device and now my work mostly only gets done on my computer during work hours. I obviously still have my iPhone and I sometimes take it on walks during the day if I want to have a productive walk, but it mostly stays plugged in in my drawer.

I always thought I wanted to be constantly connected to my dev environment and be able to work from anywhere, but it turns out that adds way too much noise to my life and is a net negative. I was constantly thinking about work and then able to act on those thoughts so the cycle just continued until I fell asleep.

Meanwhile, I get to do more of what I enjoy. Of course, it's always tempting to let Codex work on the core product itself - but I resisted that urge so far as I feel a strong sense of ownership and craftsmanship - plus its the thing I actually like doing.

> Should tech workers supercharged by AI be able to take more time off? Meta's chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, said he doesn't think so. [1]

> A Meta employee asked Bosworth if AI productivity gains could be channeled into more vacation time — specifically, the revival of "Meta Days," a since-canceled holiday program that allowed staff to take a few extra days off. [1]

> In response, Bosworth said that while working at Meta isn't easy, that time should be used to build more products for its users [1]

> "stop asking about Meta Days. It's very dumb." [1]

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-cto-andrew-bosworth-ai-...

But I would also expect a VP of Technology to stop doing technical work and start being a strategic leader. This is a huge mistake on OP’s part, and one that first-time strategic leaders who come from an engineering background make frequently.

You are a VP now, it's time to delegate your work. You are most valuable for your guidance on the overarching direction of your platform, not for doing IC work.

Both of us feel the AI fatigue from time to time.

My personal analysis is that the speed went up, with this the bandwith of different topics. Other factors that weigh in are a not lowering learning curve inside the heavily iterating AI sector and the chattiness of the Agents. If not stopped they produce so much facts that it kills me. I started constantly working on this to stop the waterfall of facts and get ontop of it.

Still not succeeded :)

Even though everyone has the same tools and it can clearly be seen not everyone has the same output.

For those still employed—buckle up!

The pitch was that same amount of work would be delivered 10 times faster. Meaning you would do 10 times more work in the same time span.

No employer will ever pitch you 4 hour work week, only Tim Ferriss.

The way I tell this to people is "I have never worked less and I have never been more productive".

Candidly, though, in my experience, when I've seen other people work with AI, I can see them aligning more with the author than me.

All of my effort goes into ensuring that agents work autonomously for days to weeks without me having to coddle them. This takes a lot of effort to ensure that my memories are pruned, my git logs are clean, that I've transferred my way of thinking to agents so that they can make autonomous decisions which are 60-80% aligned with what I would want.

And the reason I go with 60-80% is that's the level of alignment I expect to get from my product & engineering teams, in a given sprint/period. Like with them, I've accepted that I'm not the perfect solution and it's going to go through a few iterations before I shape it into what I want it to be.

If people are designing workflows which require them to constantly chat with their models, then I can see why they would feel burnt out because it's an absolute drag talking to the machine.

And multitasking is easier with ai. Have a lead agent keep track of your work. With a real task tool. I can drive several projects at once. I finally (have an agent) keep my work journal updated.

I do miss raw coding sometimes. But if I am honest most of what I did was filling in boilerplate code that was not really new or interesting. The real thinking was not the code itself. The code was a means.

I used to worry about who will learn coding anymore but seeing how I can push into new types of systems now, my worry is reduced. Kids will just have really awesome assistants who can explain it all in the way they prefer.

This is also where is makes sense for “the company to expect MoRe WoRk FoR tHe SaMe PaY?!?”

But, this model does (likely) result a reduced need for headcount. That’s the scary part. People complaining about putting in the same hours and being chaffed that they get the same pay for more productivity is bupkis. But people getting cannned or unable to find work, I really feel for them.

Nowadays I’m receiving longer emails than usual and longer code to review. Less spelling errors, but long and pointless prose. Less superficial bugs but more sneaky, fundamental problems.

There is also the trap where you go from 0-80% immediately but end up spending time anyway fixing the last 20%, and it’s unclear if there was a benefit or loss in productivity. Sometimes the almost there rabbit hole of prompting can be misleading.

And it largely seems to be delivering on that?

We are basically not limited by the time it takes to write code, we never were. But we ARE limited in the time it takes to wrote ancillary code: CI and testing code being the biggest, but also tools.

Iv'e started on 2 bigger sub-projects that could help with coverage and finding really hard bugs that I would _never_ have even touched before, becuase I could never have fitted it with my regular work that actually has high priority.

I'm living in the South - imagine if my neighbors' great-great-great-great-great grand papi had Boston Dynamics robot dogs!

Let that be the cautionary tale.