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.
It seems like a pretty common misunderstanding in rank-and-file AI-boosterism. I'm guessing that reflects their initial experience, before their employer adjusts their expectations, extrapolated out to infinity. Your correct understanding makes AI sound like a bad deal for workers (and it is), so my theory AI-enthusiastic boosters have to engage in a degree of reality distortion to keep up their enthusiasm.
It's very normal to think that the extra revenue growth you bring in should mean you have either 1) a larger share of the pie for every efficiency increase that grows revenue or 2) less expectation from you, as a worker, to labor as intensively since you are continue to bring in surplus value that is being actively skimmed from.
It's also very normal to force businesses by law to either or both. But it's not happening these days.
Who wins in the market?
It's not a uniform answer. There are times and places where the first one wins, as well as a mixed strategy. But I think broadly speaking the majority answer is the second.
The one who understands that "10 times the work" is not necessarily absorbable by the market, and adjust to whatever lesser value still works, and still fires a lot of the 100.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/13/business/dealbook/ai-prod...
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/newe.12400
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/23/1130393/how-soci...
I don't understand what kind of society we're building right now. Anthropic and other AI labs at $20T valuations, the 1% monopolizing all the wealth and the rest of us out of a job and fighting for the scraps?
There seems to be some sort of magical thinking within the AI crowd at the moment, that it'll all work itself out in the end.
- Build the God Machine
- ??????
- POST-SCARCITY UTOPIA!
Honestly, I think the only shot workers have is unionization plus really aggressive political action.
The problem is successful action will require setting aside pretty much all the culture war issues that are used to divide the working class, and I don't really see that happening. If anything culture-war polarization is getting worse.
It will also require some formally-privileged groups like software engineers to jettison their self-deceptive libertarian impulses, and properly understand their true role in society. That's also challenging.
Large companies have been spending millions in propaganda and attacks to ensure that people in the US think that unions are pure communism. By the time we get enough people to make a difference there may be T100's stepping on our bones at this point.
What a convenient little trap we've set for ourselves. If everyone's money was set to run out at the same time, there'd be problems.
Obviously things can change but in general I feel AI jockeying is the exact opposite of showing solidarity with the people you work with.
> There is no reason we aren’t working seven days a week beyond people fighting not to.
But far away enough that we need to look at this again and get more time back to the workers.
Much of this unionization conversation has lot the plot about how unionization is about collective bargaining, but you still have to bargain. Both sides have options and you can’t come to the bargaining table with a belief that you can get whatever you want by threatening to strike or quit. There are limits to this and they’re decided by markets and technology.
I'm hoping we don't need another Great Depression this time, a collapsing economy brought about by mistaken belief by those on top that they should have the right to keep it all... but that might be exactly what we need. We'll see.
What stops me from working more than others is being smarter than my competitors right now. Not being smarter in any objective, fixed way. To keep it that way I must constantly evolved, learn.
Yes, micromanaging AIs is more intense for me than coding, and feels more tiring, I hope that (or I) will change, somehow.
Apparently, minute hands were added to clocks so factory owners could extract more work from their employees.
Medieval people used to own more property (though not technologically equivalent of course) and "owned" more of their time than the average person today.
----
As for the title of this post, I can testify to that: As a solo coder, AI has actually increased the amount of work I do - but in a good way!
Even on non vibe-coded stuff, AI reviews keep helping me finding bugs and inconsistencies to fix that would have taken ages to even notice on my own
but more than that, whenever I have the faintest idea about anything, I can immediately put it to practice and explore it further or move on to other ideas.
Even when I'm outdoors away from my computer doing some normal life stuff in meatspace, I often think of stuff and pull out my phone and open the ChatGPT app to remote into my computer's Codex.
This is actually fun.
If union A is like "work less let AI take the slack" and union B is like "work the same, use AI to achieve more, let AI help us win" I'm joining union B every time.
For example waste management generally has very strong unions in the developed world because 1) capital intensity 2) operations immediately seize on labour withdrawal 3) consequences of strikes are in a golden zone of painful but not existential so are tolerated 4) extract a relatively small proportion of local gov funds, so don’t create that much powerful opposition 5) labour force is locally concentrated and highly socialised.
Those pillars of power don’t rely much on any particular legal or political system.
There's the historical experience with early/mid 20th century unions, the establishment of the 8 hour workweek and worker rights, even Henry Ford's wage increases.
Not necessarily that they'd do it out of their own good heart, of course.
Once you go from horse to tractor the fields increase but work hours doesn't decrease. And if you still use a horse, you are outperformed by the tractor guys who will sell stuff at less the price that you can sustain.
So that means shipping higher quality, faster, with more features, and for a lower end price.
The abstract concept of value you mention is part of the same vocabulary managers use, and I believe they often end up confusing even themselves with it.
They are just as rational as any other human being.
An increase in efficiency in and of itself, maybe, but there is no such thing. The increase in efficiency has largely come from deskilling the job. Deskilling the job makes the employees time less valuable, because they can be substituted for another more easily.
[edit: it's important to mention that this is compatible with programmer ego trips. I consider myself a reasonably good programmer and I've been doing it for a long time, but AI has made me far more eligible for jobs in languages that I have never used on platforms that I have never worked with.]
But another factor is that just because you can do work faster doesn't mean there's more work to do, so if you were hitting all your deadlines before with two employees, now you can fire one. Which one that will be is the result of a reverse wage auction.
That's not that self evident yet. If AI is a multiplier it might be the other way around i.e. can a $300k engineer + unlimited tokens generate more a $200k in extra value compared to a $100k engineer? That should be much easier to achieve with AI than without it? The more you spend on tokens the more it makes sense to hire the most highly skilled people you can find since their salaries are no longer that significant.
I don't think the dynamics are similar to what they are e.g. during the industrial revolution since AI is more than capable of clicking the submit button on its own.
The issue is that wages are based on supply and demand and rarely directly related to how much value you generate.
If things are to rebalance again and give some of the productivity gains back to the rest of us, we should be working far less and I hope it comes with less of a fight than it took for us to get 2 days a week off.
It's been over 100 years now.
Shouldn’t they now pay more for more work?
Also, as someone who has been self employed I can tell you that you're working 2x-3x as much as someone who is employed and you have to pay more in taxes.
Otherwise most of us would still toil on the fields just to harvest a tiny bit more food than our immediate family needs.
Yes but the number of people who actually worked on the R&D and the amount of time they spent on it is absolutely insignificant on the grand scale of things.
The amount of mental energy saved, and downright stimulation gained from seeing rapid feedback in a tight loop is making my workday much easier. I have enough left to continue it longer.
That is not something that should be celebrated.
It is a warning sign.
You're right that this would be awful if mandatory.
but it often was socially mandatory!
At least when those times come, the work can go much further before I have to actually "check in" vs doing some well-trod analysis via automation I've set up. That's great!
It’s a mixed bag. I would say the worst part is that the increased level of output AND the increased level of tech debt is becoming accepted as the norm.
How did that work out in 1933?
There are limits to how much an economy can shake up before structural problems appear that means when the music stops there is no chair anywhere for you to sit in.
>At any moment in time there are growth areas in the economy
For bread line server?
Worse with the modern world you're not just competing with your neighbor, you're competing with the entire world and if the other parts of the world have lower costs you can quickly find yourself in a trap.
I guess the idea that AI will do all the work and either take care of us or kill us all. Which will probably happen, but the transition takes years and in the meantime we work much harder. People were expecting a fast takeoff.
(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....
Every technology, even technologies that are, from the limited and naive perspective of the user, "free" (LLms can do what I used to do a lot faster than I can, and I don't need to maintain them right?) is not actually free. All technologies bring about their own demands and need for maintenance. Often they don't actually eliminate labor, they just shift it to new areas.
Consider LLMs. Even at the user level they have created their own information ecosystem and new grunt work and overhead. Now you have to prompt, you need to organize and manage context, skills, memory. You need to keep up with model releases. You need to be more vigilant reviewing things, the list goes on.
At a higher level they create even more toil, we need to maintain vast electrical supports and data infrastructure, data needs to be amassed continually for training, the information environment needs to be filtered and sorted more than ever as it gets flooded with slop.
This is the grand irony of technology. It's actually pretty rare for it to just be a total labor saving device. More often its real benefit is rearrangement of the world's structure and resources to move labor to more optimal places for certain needs (for example water supply systems).
This rearrangement also often rearranged financial resources and power. The big problem with LLMs today is that this aspect of the rearrangement is one of great concentration, and it's concerning (employers having a lot more power to extract labor from employees is one example)
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.
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.
What it seems to miss is that we get to walk around while doing some work, not the other way around. The alternative would be being stuck at a desk or in a meeting room, not quietly enjoying nature on a day off.
> quietly enjoying nature on a day off
You seem to have your concepts mixed up!
I for one much prefer to do work at a desk instead of wandering around.
In the end it was just a hassle and a distraction. I’d rather have 5 solid hours of work and 5 hours of non-work, rather than 10 hours of an awkward hybrid.
Not sure when you last tried, but I feel I would not be able to do what I do today with last years models.
Also, you are telling me that you can get only with voice interaction an AI to write well engineered and maintainable code, something I've yet to see an AI be able to do, to me the result that they tend is at best the same of a junior developer, except that the junior developer learns, the AI continues to make the same mistakes (because it's context is limited, when it's full it's full).
Or you would be unemployed and nervous about how you were going to pay your bills, replaced by someone willing to do the same work for lower cost while chained to said desk.
edit: It is actually kinda funny. One would think that if we would embrace the full spectrum now, we could have the best of both worlds ( logic and language side by side solving humanity's problems ).
edit: conditional syntax
For example, skills with sales are far more important than actual software engineering.
99.99% of software business is marketing..lol
There's an alternate employment arrangement...
If the coding was nothing, every good marketing guy could go solo and start large software businesses. It does not happen. You mostly see successful technical founders, or usually a marriage of technical and business cofounders.
Finding a fit between the viable business opportunities and the tech to address it is what's what, and requires several skills: technical, marketing, communication, product design, etc.
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.
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 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.
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 :)
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.
You and I have different definitions of a productive walk. To me a walk is productive if I get my heart beating fast. Bonus points if I see an unusual bird or insect.
Even though everyone has the same tools and it can clearly be seen not everyone has the same output.
I know, this ship has long sailed, but I just can't get used and accept this kind of writing.
So on average I would say I'm getting about as much work done now as before ai.
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.
The reason is economic growth for the company / the country.
This in turn is a more subtle point than it seems at first glance. Not having economic growth isn't really a desirable option for a company, a country, or in (the long run) the people involved.
That reasoning makes sense in a world where people are paid in proportion to the value they create. But it doesn't make sense in a world where supply and demand determine the price paid for something. Because if you can do the same work in less time in means you've actually increased the supply of producing things and thus decreased its worth.
I want to work 30 hours a week. Do you want to work 30 hours a week?
It's okay to just vote for the things you want.
So many people make their voting decisions based on, like, whether or not billionaires will leave the state, but--again--it's okay to just vote for things that benefit you personally. Who told you to worry about billionaires, and why did you let them influence you that way? The billionaires will be fine.
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)
In manufacturing, an oversupply of finished product quickly leads to overfull warehouses, and the company knows to slow down production until product moves.
In software it’s less visible. Features that nobody is buying don’t physically pile up in the shipping department. Decades of accounting for all programmer time as productivity has left managers with limited ability to recognize time spent building unnecessary bloat as a loss. Maintenance burden isn’t fully recognized as a loss, either. We tend to assume it’s roughly equivalent to profit, the same as all other code the programmers churn out.
And what you are seeing now is that it was always a myth. Not everything you do at work is profitable or productive, and AI is causing that fraction to decrease. So of course they aren’t going to pay you more for it.
> 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-...
'You should be able to work 7x as hard now'
Not sure where he got the multiplier, but I gently tried to educate him what AI actually does and does not do over time.
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.
"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.
frangonf below me brought the receipts too. Unfortunately flagged as [dead]