AI promised efficiency. Instead, it's making us work harder

Personally, I’ve been seeing the number of changes for a PR starting to reach into the mid-hundreds now. And fundamentally the developers who make them don’t understand how they work. They often think they do, but then I’ll ask them something about the design and they’ll reply: “IDK Claude did that.”

By no means am I down on AI, but I think proper procedures need to be put into place unless we want a giant bomb in our code base.

The problem is people trying to make the models do things that are too close to their limit. You should use LLMs for things they can ace already, not waste time trying to get it to invent some new algorithm. If I don't 0-3 shot a problem then I will just either do it manually or not do it.

Similarly to giving up on a Google search that you try a few times and nothing useful comes in the first few prompts. You don't keep at it the whole afternoon.

> But here’s the kicker: we were told AI would free us up for “higher-level work.” What actually happened? We just found more work to fill the space. That two-hour block AI created by automating your morning reports? It’s now packed with three new meetings.

But then a few sentences later, she argues that tools made us less productive.

> when developers used AI tools, they took 19% longer to complete tasks than without AI. Even more telling: the developers estimated they were 20% faster with AI—they were completely wrong about their own productivity.

Then she switches back to saying it saves us time but cognitive debt!

> If an AI tool saves you 30 minutes but leaves you mentally drained and second-guessing everything, that’s not productivity—that’s cognitive debt.

I think you have to pick one, or just admit you don't like AI because it makes you feel icky for whatever reason so you're going to throw every type of argument you can against it.

This is basically the definition of increased productivity and efficiency. Doing more stuff in the same amount of time. What I tell people who are anxious about whether their job might be automated away by AI is this:

We will never run out of the problems that need solving. The types of problems you spend your time solving will change. The key is to adapt your process to allocate your time to solving the right kinds of problems. You don’t want the be the person taking an hour to do arithmetic by hand, when you have access to spreadsheets.

The most junior dev on my team was tasked with setting up a repo for a new service. The service is not due for many many months so this was an opportunity to learn. What we got was a giant PR with hundreds of new configurations no one has heard of. It's not bad, it's just that we don't know what each conf does. Naturally we asked him to explain or give an overview, he couldn't. Well because he fed the whole thing to an LLM and it spat out the repo. He even had fixes for bugs we didn't know we had in other repos. He didn't know either. But it took the rest of the team digging in to figure out what's going on.

I'm not against using LLM, but now I've added a new step in the process. If anyone makes giant PRs, they'll also have to make a presentation to give everyone an overview. With that in mind, it forces devs to actually read through the code they generate and understand it.

I'm not sure that Claude saves me time -- I just spent my weekend working on a Claude Code Audio hook with Claude which I obviously wouldn't have worked on elsewise, and that's hardly the gardening I intended to do ... but man it was fun and now my CC sessions are a lot easier to track by ear!

And that was before Claude Code.

I'm not sure if this is caused by AI, or by the nature of business or the culture of many companies. Replacing AI with any automations, wouldn't it be the same result?

It’s a shame too because it really could have been something so much more amazing. I’d imagine higher education would shift to how it used to be: a past-time for bored elites. We would probably see a large reduction in the middle class and its eventual destruction. First they went for manufacturing with its strong unions, now they go for the white-collar worker who has little solidarity for his common man (see lack of unions and ethics in our STEM field; most likely because we thought we could never be made redundant). Field by field the middle class will be destroyed and the lower class in thrall of addictive social media, substances, and the illusion of selection into the influencer petty-elite (which remain compliant because they don’t offer value proportional to the bribes they receive). The elites will have recreated the dynamic that existed for most of human history. Final point, see the obsession of current elites in using artificial insemination to create a reliable and durable contingent of heirs. Something previous rulers could only dream about in history.

It disgusts me and pisses me off so much.

At first, we spend our time one way (say eight hours, just to pick a number). Then we get the tools to do all of that in six hours. Then when job seeking and hiring, we get one worker willing to work six hours and another willing to work eight, so the eight-hour worker gets the job, all else equal. Labor is a marketplace, so we work as much as we're willing to in aggregate, which is roughly constant over time, so efficiency will never free up individuals' time.

In the context of TFA, it means we just shift our time to "harder" work (in the sense of work that AI can't do yet).

Here is an example.

I decided to create a new app, so I write down a brief of what it should do, ask AI to create a longer readme file about the platform along with design, sequence diagram, and suggested technologies.

I review that document, see if there is anything I can amend, then ask AI for the implementation plan.

Up until this point, this would probably increased the time I usually use to describe the platform in writing. But realistically, designing and thinking about systems were never that fast. I would have to think about use cases, imagine workflows in my mind, do pen and paper diagrams which I don’t think any of the productivity reports are covering.

Marx: workers sell their capacity to work for a fixed period, and any productivity improvements within that time become surplus value captured by capital.

AI tools are just the latest mechanism for extracting more output from the same wage. The real issue isn’t the technology—it’s that employees can’t capture gains from their own efficiency improvements. Until compensation models shift from time-based to outcome-based, every productivity breakthrough just makes us more profitable to employ, not more prosperous ourselves.

It’s the Industrial Revolution all over again and we’re the Luddites

you will never be given your time back by an employer. you have to take it. you might be able to ask for it, but it won't be freely given, whether or not you become more efficient. LLM chatbots and agents are, in this sense, just another tool that changes our relationship to the work we do (but never our relationship to work).

This is what the whole four-day workweek movement is about; to reclaim some of that productivity increase as personal time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-day_workweek

Economist Keynes predicted one century ago that the workweek would drop to 15 hours due to rising productivity. It has not happened for social reasons.

I don't know what's going to happen when humans become redundant; that's an incipient issue we'll have to grapple with.

"While the cotton gin made the process of cleaning cotton significantly faster, it ultimately led to an increase in the demand for enslaved labor, not a decrease."

A lot of automation leads to more work for someone. Reduces some jobs, and piles on others. Maybe 12 union jobs are removed, but then keeping the robots running falls on 1-2 IT staff.

Unfortunately, it is always a deliberate lie by the people who stand to gain from the new technology. Anyone who has thought about it for five seconds knows that this is not how capitalism works. Productivity gains are almost immediately absorbed and become the new normal. Firms that operate at the old level of productivity get washed out.

I simply can't believe that we're still falling for this. But let's hold out hope. Maybe AGI is just around the corner, and literally everyone in the world will spend our time sipping margaritas on the beach while we count our UBI. Certainly AI could never accelerate wealth concentration and inequality, right? RIGHT?

Edit: "amirhirsch" user probably explained this better than me in an above comment.

"But here's the kicker"

"It's not x. It's y."

"The companies that foo? They bar."

Em-dashes galore.

I'm either hypersensitized, seeing ghosts, or this article got the "yo claude make it pop" treatment. It's sad, but anything overly polished immediately triggers some "is this slop or an original thought actually worth my time" response.