> I've had conversations with people recently who are losing sleep because they're finding building yet another feature with "just one more prompt" irresistible.
This is actually a really good point that I have kind of noticed when using AI for side project, so being on my own time. The allure of thinking "Oh I wonder how it will perform with this feature request if I give it this amount of info".
Can't say I would put off sleep for it but I get the sentiment for sure.
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, for now I just time box these sessions.
But I feel I'm trading thinking time for execution time, and understanding time for testing time. I'm not yet convinced I like those tradeoffs.
Edit: Just a clarification: I currently work in two modes, depending on the project. In some, I use agentic development. In most, I still do it "old school". That's what makes the side effects I'm noticing so surprising. Agentic development pulls me down rabbit holes and makes me loose the plot and focus. Traditional development doesn't, its side effects apparently keep me focused and in control.
Computer languages were the lathe for shaping the machines to make them do whatever we want, AI is a CNC. Another abstraction layer for making machines do whatever we want them to do.
This is not a technology problem. AI intensifies work because management turns every efficiency gain into higher output quotas. The solution is labor organization, not better software.
TBH, I have found AI addictive, you use it for the first time, and its incredible. You get a nice kick of dopamine. This kick of dopamine, is decreasing with every win you get. What once felt incredible, is just another prompt today.
Those things don't excite you any more.
Plus, the fact that you no longer exercise your brain at work any more.
Plus, the constant feeling of FOMO.
> I've had conversations with people recently who are losing sleep because they're finding building yet another feature with "just one more prompt" irresistible.
Literal work junkies.
And what’s the point?
If you’re working on your own project then “just one more feature, bro” isn’t going to make next Minecraft/Photopea/Stardew Valley/name your one man wonder.
If you’re working for someone, then you’re a double fool, because you’re doing work of two people for the pay of one.
People are a gas, and they expand to fill the space they're in. Tools that produce more work do make people's lives easier, they mean an individual just needs to do more work using their tools to do so. This is a disposition that most people have, and therefore it's unavoidable. AI is not exciting to me. I only need to use it so I don't fall behind my peers. Why would I ever be interested in that?
It's like the invention of the power loom, but for knowledge workers. Might be interesting to look at the history of industrialisation and the reactions to it.
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 there would be 1000s of do-everything websites in the future in the best case, or billions of doing one-thing terribly apps in the worst case.
percentage of good, well planned, consistent and coherent software is going to approach zero in both cases.
You need 1000 engineers because you have poor engineering leadership, or no engineering leadership, and engineering is a black hole that management shovels money into where it falls directly onto a huge plane of middle managers who do the best they can with their limited power and understanding. Meanwhile your sales team is writing specifications for the next version of the product, which they already promised to customers, and they hired an outside consultant to transform it into 500 spec documents written in damn near legalese, which will appear one day on the lead engineer's desk with no foreshadowing. It turns out that throwing more engineers at the problem helps here because you'll run out of tasks to assign to all of them and some will roam the halls and accidentally connect distributed knowledge back together.
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 short term success, and they are bullying their work-peers that they have the method they all should follow. That method being intellectually lazy, allowing the AI to code for them, which they then verify with testing and believe they are done. Meanwhile, the quiet ones are figuring out how to eliminate the need for their coworkers at all. Managers are observing productivity growth, which falters with the loud ones, but not with those quiet ones... AI is here to make the scientifically minded excel and the short cut takers can footgun themselves out of there.
Corporations have tried to reduce employee burnout exactly never times.
That’s something that starts at the top. The execs tend to be “type A++” personalities, who run close to burnout, and don’t really have much empathy for employees in the same condition.
But they also don’t believe that employees should have the same level of reward, for their stress.
For myself, I know that I am not “getting maximum result” from using LLMs, but I feel as if they have been a real force multiplier, in my work, and don’t feel burnt out, at all.
My two cents that this is part of the learning curve. With collective experience this type of work will be more understood, shared and explored. It is intense in the beginning because we are still discovering how to work with it. I think the other part being that this is a non-deterministic tool which does increase some cognitive load.
> I've had conversations with people recently who are losing sleep because they're finding building yet another feature with "just one more prompt" irresistible.
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" role.
40 years ago when I was a history major in college one of my brilliant professors gave us a book to read called "the myth of domesticity".
In the book The researcher explains that when washing machines were invented the women faced a whole new expectation of clean clothes all the time because washing clothes was much less of a labor. And statistics pointed out that women actually were washing clothes more often than doing more work after the washing machine was invented then before.
This happens with any technology. AI is no different.
I like working on my own projects, and where I found AI really shone was by having something there to bounce ideas off and get feedback.
That changes if you get it to write code for you. I tried vibe-coding an entire project once, and while I ended up with a pretty result that got some traction on Reddit, I didn't get any sense of accomplishment at all. It's kinda like doomscrolling in a way, it's hard to stop but it leaves you feeling empty.
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.
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.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 75.9 ms ] threadThis is actually a really good point that I have kind of noticed when using AI for side project, so being on my own time. The allure of thinking "Oh I wonder how it will perform with this feature request if I give it this amount of info".
Can't say I would put off sleep for it but I get the sentiment for sure.
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, for now I just time box these sessions.
But I feel I'm trading thinking time for execution time, and understanding time for testing time. I'm not yet convinced I like those tradeoffs.
Edit: Just a clarification: I currently work in two modes, depending on the project. In some, I use agentic development. In most, I still do it "old school". That's what makes the side effects I'm noticing so surprising. Agentic development pulls me down rabbit holes and makes me loose the plot and focus. Traditional development doesn't, its side effects apparently keep me focused and in control.
I prompt and sit there. Scrolling makes it worse. It's a good mental practice to just stay calm and watch the AI work.
Also this post should link to the original source as well.
As per the submission guidelines [1]:
”Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.”
[0] https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Those things don't excite you any more. Plus, the fact that you no longer exercise your brain at work any more. Plus, the constant feeling of FOMO.
It deflates you, faster.
Literal work junkies.
And what’s the point? If you’re working on your own project then “just one more feature, bro” isn’t going to make next Minecraft/Photopea/Stardew Valley/name your one man wonder. If you’re working for someone, then you’re a double fool, because you’re doing work of two people for the pay of one.
it's good that people so quickly see it as impulsive and addicting, as opposed to the slow creep of doomscrolling and algorithm feeds
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 there would be 1000s of do-everything websites in the future in the best case, or billions of doing one-thing terribly apps in the worst case.
percentage of good, well planned, consistent and coherent software is going to approach zero in both cases.
for me AI has been less about building more/fast, and more about unlocking potential that was always out of reach.
Knowledge gaps that would've taken years to fill, new angles I wouldn't have thought to explore on my own. It's not that it makes more software.
it just makes you more capable of tackling things you couldn't before.
Yeah, good luck with that.
Corporations have tried to reduce employee burnout exactly never times.
That’s something that starts at the top. The execs tend to be “type A++” personalities, who run close to burnout, and don’t really have much empathy for employees in the same condition.
But they also don’t believe that employees should have the same level of reward, for their stress.
For myself, I know that I am not “getting maximum result” from using LLMs, but I feel as if they have been a real force multiplier, in my work, and don’t feel burnt out, at all.
alpha sigma grindset
In the book The researcher explains that when washing machines were invented the women faced a whole new expectation of clean clothes all the time because washing clothes was much less of a labor. And statistics pointed out that women actually were washing clothes more often than doing more work after the washing machine was invented then before.
This happens with any technology. AI is no different.
That changes if you get it to write code for you. I tried vibe-coding an entire project once, and while I ended up with a pretty result that got some traction on Reddit, I didn't get any sense of accomplishment at all. It's kinda like doomscrolling in a way, it's hard to stop but it leaves you feeling empty.
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.