[hansonkd]

I've been saying this for the past 2 years. Even think about the stereotypical "996" work schedule that is all the rave in SF and AI founder communities.

It just takes thinking about it for 5 seconds to see the contradiction. If AI was so good at reducing work, why is it every company engaging with AI has their workload increase.

20 years ago SV was stereotyped for "lazy" or fun loving engineers who barely worked but cashed huge pay checks. Now I would say the stereotype is overworked engineers who on the midlevel are making less than 20 back.

I see it across other disciplines too. Everyone I know from sales, to lawyers, etc if they engage with AI its like they get stuck in a loop where the original task is easier but now it revealed 10 more smaller tasks that fill up their time even more so than before AI.

Thats not to say productivity gains with AI aren't found. It just seems like the gains get people into a flywheel of increasing work.

[kibwen]

Talking about "productivity" is a red herring.

Are the people leveraging LLMs making more money while working the same number of hours?

Are the people leveraging LLMs working fewer hours while making the same amount of money?

If neither of these are true, then LLMs have not made your life better as a working programmer.

[pixl97]

Regardless of that, LLMs could be a Moloch problem.

That is, if anyone uses it your life will be worse, but if you don't use it then your life will be even worse than those using it.

Too bad you programmers didn't unionize when you had the chance so you could fight this. Guess you'll have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

[coldtea]

>Are the people leveraging LLMs making more money while working the same number of hours?

Nobody is getting a raise for using AI. So no.

>Are the people leveraging LLMs working fewer hours while making the same amount of money?

Early adopters maybe, as they offload some work to agents. As AI commodifies and is the baseline, that will invert, especially as companies shed people to have the remaining "multiply" their output with AI.

So the answer will be no and no.

[nradov]

Did high-level languages and compilers make life better for working programmers? Is it even a meaningful question to ask? Like what would we change depending on the outcome?

[elevatortrim]

Of course not. In the world of capitalism and employment, money earned is not a function of productivity, it is a function of competency. It is all relative.

[athrowaway3z]

Lines of code are not a good metric for productivity.

Neither are the hours worked.

Nor is the money.

Just think of the security guard on site walking around, or someone who has a dozen monitors.

[zozbot234]

> Are the people leveraging LLMs making more money while working the same number of hours?

> Are the people leveraging LLMs working fewer hours while making the same amount of money?

Yes, absolutely. Mostly because being able to leverage LLMs effectively (which is not "vibe coding" and requires both knowing what you're doing and having at least some hunch of how the LLM is going to model your problem, whether it's been given the right data, directed properly, etc.) is a rare skill.

[asielen]

I feel this. Since my team has jumped into an AI everything working style, expectations have tripled, stress has tripled and actual productivity has only gone up by maybe 10%.

It feels like leadership is putting immense pressure on everyone to prove their investment in AI is worth it and we all feel the pressure to try to show them it is while actually having to work longer hours to do so.

[Maximus9000]

Did you know your comment was featured in TechCrunch?

https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/09/the-first-signs-of-burnout...

[pimlottc]

I laughed at all the Super Bowl commercials showing frazzled office workers transformed into happy loafers after AI has done all their work for them...

[SkyPuncher]

I chuckled at the Genspark one while imaging what the internal discussions must have been.

Obviously, "take a day off" is not the value prop their selling to buyers (company leadership), but they can't be so on the nose in a public commercial that they scare individual contributors.

[CuriouslyC]

As one of the AI people doing 996(7?) I will at least say I can watch youtube videos/play bass/etc while directing 4-5 agents without much trouble, I have my desktop set up into a terminal grid and I just hover the window I want to talk to and give voice instructions. Since I'm working on stuff I'm into the time passes pleasantly.

[sevensor]

Yeah, why would billionaires sell us something that lets us chill out all day, instead of using it themselves and capturing the value directly? You claim to have a perpetual motion machine and a Star Trek replicator rolled into one, what do you need me for?

[thinkharderdev]

There's an old saying among cyclists attributed to Greg Lemond: "It doesn't get easier, you just go faster"

[joenot443]

I don't think it's super complicated. I think that prompting takes generally less mental energy than coding by hand, so on average one can work longer days if they're prompting than if they were coding.

I can pretty easily do a 12h day of prompting but I haven't been able to code for 12h straight since I was in college.

[zeroonetwothree]

For me it’s the opposite. Coding I enter flow and can do 5 hours at a stretch while barely noticing.

Prompting has so many distractions and context switches I get sick of it after an hour.

[treetalker]

Isn’t the grander question why on earth people would tolerate, let alone desire, more hours of work every day?

The older I get, the more I see the wisdom in the ancient ideas of reducing desires and being content with what one has.

---

Later Addition:

The article's essential answer is that workers voluntarily embraced (and therefore tolerated) the longer hours because of the novelty of it all. Reading between the lines, this is likely to cause shifts in expectation (and ultimately culture) — just when the novelty wears off and workers realize they have been duped into increasing their work hours and intensity (which will put an end to the voluntary embracing of those longer hours and intensity). And the dreaded result (for the poor company, won't anyone care about it?!) is cognitive overload, hence worker burnout and turnover, and ultimately reduced work quality and higher HR transaction costs. Therefore, TFA counsels, companies should set norms regarding limited use of generative language models (GLMs, so-called "AI").

I find it unlikely that companies will limit GLM use or set reasonable norms: instead they'll crack the whip!

---

Even Later Addition:

As an outsider, I find it at once amusing and dystopian to consider the suggestions offered at the end of the piece: in the brutalist, reverse-centaur style, workers are now to be programmed with modifications to their "alignment … reconsider[ation of] assumptions … absor[ption of] information … sequencing … [and] grounding"!

The worker is now thought of in terms of the tool, not vice versa.

[jplusequalt]

>so on average one can work longer days if they're prompting than if they were coding

It's 2026 for god's sake. I don't want to work __longer__ days, I want to work __shorter__ days.

[SkyPuncher]

I agree. However, for me, I'm finding that I'm drastically leveling up what I'm doing in my day to day. I'm a former founder and former Head of Engineering, back in an IC role.

The coding is now assumed "good enough" for me, but the problem definition and context that goes into that code aren't. I'm now able to spend more time on the upstream components of my work (where real, actual, hard thinking happens) while letting the AI figure out the little details.

[Ygg2]

If you're in the office for 12h it won't matter if you're proompting, pushing pens or working your ass off. You gave that company 12h of your life. You're not getting those back.

[packetlost]

While I agree with the idea that prompting is easier to get started, is it actually less work. More hours doesn't mean they're equally as productive. More, lower quality hours just makes work:life balance worse with nothing to show for it.

[lm28469]

> I can pretty easily do a 12h day of prompting

Do you want to though?

[jvanderbot]

That's a bingo.

Additionally, I can eke out 4 hrs really deep diving nowadays, and have structured my workday around that, delegating low-mental-cost tasks to after that initial dive. Now diving is a low enough mental cost that I can do 8-12hrs of it.

It's a bicycle. Truly.

[throwawaysleep]

> If AI was so good at reducing work, why is it every company engaging with AI has their workload increase.

Throughout human history, we have chosen more work over keeping output stable.

[coldtea]

Throughout human history we were never given the choice. We were forced into it like cattle.

[danaris]

"Throughout human history", approximately 90% of all work was to produce food. More work meant more food, which meant more people could survive.

We don't have to do that anymore. We have enough food for everyone.

Now, we're just being whipped to work harder to produce more profits for the people who already have more than they will ever be able to spend. We're just increasing their dollar-denominated high scores.

[throwaw12]

> If AI was so good at reducing work, why is it every company engaging with AI has their workload increase.

Isn't it simple?

Because of competition, which is increased because of entry barrier is lowered a lot for building new software products.

You output a lot, so do your competition.

[pllbnk]

I have seen this written many times and can't shake off this feeling myself; I feel more productive using LLMs but I am not sure I really am. I even feel quite overloaded right now with all the ideas that I could do. In the past I also had many ideas but they were quickly set aside understanding that there's not enough time for everything. Now, it usually starts with prompting and I get into a rabbit hole. In the end, it feels like a lot of words have been exchanged but the results are nowhere to be found.

[SkyPuncher]

> If AI was so good at reducing work, why is it every company engaging with AI has their workload increase.

Heavy machinery replaces shovels. It reduces workload on the shovel holders, However, someone still needs to produce the heavy machinery.

Some of these companies are shovel holders, realizing they need to move up stream. Some of these companies are already upstream, racing to bring a product to market.

The underlying bet for nearly all of these companies is "If I can replace one workflow with AI, I can repeat that with other workflows and dominate"

[bschwindHN]

Same story with hardware and software. Hardware gets more efficient and faster, so software devs shove more CPU intensive stuff into their applications, or just go lazy and write inefficient code.

The software experience is always going to feel about the same speed perceptually, and employers will expect you to work the same amount (or more!)

[tangjurine]

What does 20 back mean?

[natnatenathan]

I think you're missing the point. The folks pushing 996 (and willingly working 996) feel like they are in a land rush, and that AI is going to accelerate their ability "take the most amount of land" No one is optimizing for the "9 to 5" oriented engineer.

[skybrian]

Maybe ask the friendly AI about reducing project scope? But we probably won’t if we’re having too much fun.

[DaedalusII]

now everyone gets to be a manager !

[bingohbangoh]

Many people in silicon valley truly Believe that AI will take over everything. Therefore, this is the last chance to get in so you better be working really really hard.

There's a palpable desperation that makes this wave different from mobile or cloud. It's not about making things better so much as its about not being left behind.

I'm not sure of the reason for this shift. It has a lot of overlap with the grindset culture you see on Twitter where people caution against taking breaks because your (mostly imaginary) competition may catch up with you.

[lkbm]

Jevons Paradox applies to labor.

[seanmcdirmid]

996 is a Chinese term, not American.

There is a lot of work to do, just because you are doing more work with your time doesn’t mean you can somehow count that as less work.

[hansonkd]

I've only seen it in job postings and linkedin posts from SF founders.

[Bullfight2Cond]

china outlawed it