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 feel deflated by work that used to energize me? That's going to give back the productivity gain and more, while also decreasing my quality of life.

I theorise that many social ills come from workers having less pride in their skills and achievements, and a greater sense of social alienation, due to automation.

If you spend countless hours at work, and you partially define yourself by your work, and you realise you are easily replaceable then I cannot imagine this comes without mass social malaise that manifests itself elsewhere.

When you know you're essentially babysitting the workhorse to ensure it doesn't go off the rails, I can't see job satisfaction, and the social consequences of such, increasing.

6 hours a week is low, unless its the average spread across industries. I think I spend more time in Claude Code via the CLI versus any other app I have on my laptop.

Like others said, the frustration is when it gets something so wrong you just think "wow, how'd you mess that up?" but when it gets it right its kind of nice. I also dont like that I basically tell Claude what to do, and then either go to busy work or waste time on the internet.

I see some similarity to how I felt when library management/wrangling became a huge part of software development.

In the last century I enjoyed crafting my own 'libraries' of functions that I could then use on the projects I worked on. As time went on, there was less and less of a point doing that as the odds rose near to 100% that there was 'a library for that' thing I was working on, so I was encouraged/forced to download it and use it.

It solved problems and was quicker than writing bespoke code (and libraries were hardly a new idea), so the logic was hard to deny, but I enjoyed my job less over time. Now I've risen up the ranks and now code mostly for fun (yes, I use AI to write functions for me) I look at what it must be like to enter the industry and think it all looks very different to how it did when I started.

You could argue that AI has done this much faster than it did in my early career, so people have less of the 'boiling frog' experience I had, and more of a 'sudden shock' to the system.

It's sad, but I've been doing this to other industries all my career, so I can hardly complain.

You pay per token, even on subscription models the limit is tokens.

If I was valued at 1 trillion dollars, and I was in the hole enough to sink a couple small countries' GDP, maybe I would slowly start to optimize to maximize token usage.

I want to sell tokens, how do I sell more tokens? Not by doing the same work in less tokens, that's for sure.

This is like if you pay me by the hour and then excitedly tell me that you keep paying 10k a month and it's great. I will most certainly not work faster, in this hypothetical, if you tell me you love spending money because it gives you a dopamine rush. I would probably spend a couple more hours REALLY thinking about the task, maybe writing some docs nobody will read, maybe considering multiple options, doing benchmarks, doing research, and then later maybe ill do the actual task as well.

Im not saying these AI companies are scamming us, but the incentives are there and extremely clear. The only thing currently holding it back is that there is some vague kind of competition.

I spend at least 6 hours a week arguing with bots owned by other teams, as I’m unable to reach a human before I bypass their bot. 10k person company, clients are paying for my time.

I've found that setting good guardrails, and running in a sandbox so that the agent doesn't keep asking tedious permission questions, makes things go a LOT smoother.

Generally, I spend anywhere between 15 mins and an hour setting things up (depending on how well the project is set up for AI work), and then set the agent going, coming back in a half-hour to an hour to check its progress. Generally, the tooling keeps it honest (for golang, forbidigo is AWESOME). 80% of the questions the agent asks me require a lot of thought. 20% of what it does needs correction.

The other thing to remember with LLMs is that they are NOT human, and won't react in a human way. So you'll see strikes of "brilliance" followed by the absolutely bizarre. But good guardrails keep that to a minimum.

i've seen a number of articles claiming things like "devs self report they'er +x% more productive with AI, but actually they're -y% LESS efficient!". and i think that this is explanation for why.

as a boss (or researcher) i'm going to measure productivity based on amount of output per hour that i'm paying you; as a workers, i'm going to measure productivity based on amount of output relative to the amount of effort i'm putting in.

so what may be happening is that bosses see that output is at 80% (productivity down!) but workers see that they can give that 80% output with 40% effort (productivity up!).

i was a senior designer that basically had to reclass to a manager/senior manager role just to keep a job that didn't touch AI as much.

the wild thing is, i liked my job 3 years ago. i liked the satisfaction of creating for sales. they could be annoying, but it was minor normal (human) corporate squabbles. now, when they're explicitly bragging about getting rid of designers and treating us as sub-human, it's creating resentment and misery. personally job satisfaction sharply decreased in the last 6 months let alone the last 3 years - i'd say from 80% happy to 20%.

personally, i think suicides are probably going to be on the rise in a big way specifically due to this; and that's just the people who can hang onto a job right now; cannot tell you how many designers and animators are out of jobs and desperate.

I am actively developing on 4 projects fulltime. Kind of like double or triple dipping but just 1 employer. With a Claude Code license I'm running 2-4 CLI instances with AI. I'm botsitting 6-8 hours a day and getting more done then every. I love how much I can build using AI

My challenge has been trying to manage my higher-level context. I've gotten a pretty good setup where I have project-level orchestrator agents that can spin up workers to implement tasks with minimal oversight, and the resulting work is usually quite good (especially after I give it the mandatory "make the comments less verbose" refining, etc.). But that means I'm doing even more context-switching. I've gotten to the point where I have a half-dozen draft PRs that just need my review before I tag my colleagues, and trying to dig up the context from all of those tasks can be paralyzing.

My favourite personal experience is how they disabled yolo mode in Claude Code at my workplace

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.

As always... no AI-hypester ever talks about Amdahls law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law).

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.

This kind of reminds me of an article that I saw on HN ages back, there's like a subset of office workers who automated their Excel jobs, and just show up to work, read books, and do literally anything, while Excel does their work for them, and they collect their paycheck.

Bot-sitting is the new long compilation times.

6 hours which could be spent playing Doom!

Don't worry, soon you won't have a job.

For me, AI can sometimes create a false sense of productivity. It's similar to how in the past, people would spend time creating the perfect setup with notion templates, pomodoro timers and productivity tools, or tweaking their environment for maximum productivity, instead of actually doing productive work.

But now it's happening at the company level: "We're going to add a chatbot to increase productivity! Now MCP tools! Then agentic workflows! We’ll add skills, and now productivity will go up! Maybe loops will do it?"

It is surprising! I would have thought it is at least 6 hours per day.

Understanding what is going on with AI productivity is … frustrating to say the least.

The best I can say is that genAI is a self reported a 20% efficiency boost, and for a very (very) small group of people, it’s maybe a 2-3x boost. (And if you are at a frontier lab, you go fly into the big bucket of exceptions)

At this point, for most use cases, AI productivity is either the equivalent of giving people 3D printers, and seeing little benefit, or signing up for an outsourcing service, just without the development of human capital anywhere.

I don't know what they're complaining about. AI has freed us from the drudgery of craftsmanship, letting us focus on the important stuff—managerial and administrative work!

(There's a reason why I call it the MBA's stone. It transmutes all knowledge work into a problem of management.)

It's already becoming a racket.

I have barely technical people I knew from college pushing the latest AI certification (I can't imagine this staying relevant for longer than 6 months) and one being hired as a frontier AI engineer.

It reminds me of 2000 all over again where knowing html got you a six-figure job.

Isn’t this just the new type of work? Human in the loop of automated processes?

Welcome to the factory!

'Botsitting' -- that word is going into my 2026 lexicon! :-)

“the incredible ground-level utility that many of us on HN celebrate every day through undeniable, massive productivity gains”

I’ve been told before.

And if management decides we don't need those 6 hours of human work, will everyone still be complaining?

It takes years to adapt fully to new tools, and it takes years for the toolmakers to figure out what the tools need to do

This is all normal. It’s also well worth the time spent learning

I could care less about bot sitting (haven’t we always written our own automation?), but it’s botsitting the unverified slop that people send you that fuels frustration. I thought I worked with competent people who respected me

Just 6 hours, lol!

[flagged]

[flagged]

[dead]

[dead]