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)
[–] bunderbunder 3 days ago
[–] sailfast 3 days ago
The other factor here is scaling of humans. Without these tools we would need a lot more humans. We don’t need as many but the ones we do have are heavily taxed. That salary savings should be passed on (again, relative productivity to AI spend) but we’ll see!
[–] bunderbunder 3 days ago
I’m sure the ship will eventually right itself, but it’s going to take some time for the profession to digest how AI coding has changed things and how to adjust incumbent working norms to account for it.
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.