This seems very related to a trend I’m seeing as my company goes all in on AI: everyone thinks that every problem is “a couple hours” with AI now, and they all want zero external dependencies because they can move faster alone. As a result, we’re now in an even worse “yet-another-…” age where everyone has built approximately the same (but somehow incompatible) versions of all the same beginner-level software, and (ironically) while they want no external dependencies they’re also pushing for org-level mandates to require everyone else to use their solution. Meanwhile, no one wants to do the slow/bottleneck part that cant easily be automated or scaled; they just throw an “agent” at it and call it done—but there’s nothing _there_. You can trust the agent on easy tasks and you can’t trust it on hard ones, but you can’t tell which ones are easy or hard. Improvements in foundation model tech move thresholds of the problem but can’t eliminate it.
Long story short, I think we’re in a phase where the organizational value function is lagging behind the tech. A “proof of concept” used to be correlated with “proof of work” and some amount of domain understanding, but I think now what we need is a focus on “proof of understanding” or else you’re probably just wasting tokens on a baby version of the problem. A decent proxy right now is that if you have zero external dependencies then your solution is probably a toy.
I’m seeing kinda the opposite. At some point it becomes obvious what to build and there’s no friction to building it anymore. So you get a flood of low effort copies of the same thing and no one wants to depend on anyone else, and the old value function was that ownership matters. I think the new value function needs to be much more focused on outcomes—and ownership isn’t an outcome.
This is huge... At least from what I've seen, many companies (even if they don't know it) are largely sloppy R&D shops. Most people are on projects that are highly speculative and unlikely to generate revenue. But it often isn't framed that way. Everyone believes their project is the obvious way forward.
In my side hustle time, I use coding agents to explore what if projects I would otherwise never get to build.
At my day job, I use AI to fix config, container, and installation issues so I can spend my time coding instead of struggling to fix mostly other people's mistakes. And really, in this age of python wheels, containers, virtual environments, and fragmented APIs, the cognitive load of doing this by hand would shut me down for the day.
1.5 years in and I haven't burnt out. If anything, I'm ramping up. I'm no longer afraid of adding a web UI, or insane numbers of unit tests, or deploying other people's software.
What I'm not doing is using it to build products, but instead just doing so to augment the supporting stack. All of this is subject to change as the AI landscape evolves.
That's exactly what the article highlight might actually put your "competitors" (if you see others like that) in front of you, as focus and "what you actually did" becomes more important. Might be that while you shipped and experimented with 50 different APIs, your "competitor"/peer just did 3, but they were more carefully considered so the payoff ended up bigger/better, in whatever way that could be.
Pick a website you like, and tell claude to use it for inspiration. I do this all the time and the results are pretty impressive and different than what you get out of the box prompting.
> Pick a website you like, and tell claude to use it for inspiration.
I believe you misspelled "rip it off."
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that people are using the tools built by ripping off the collective creative works of humanity to rip off individual things, too.
When other people emulate your behavior because they appreciate the results you got, we used to call that leadership. Something has gone awry that we now call it a ripoff.
> At my day job, I use AI to fix config, container, and installation issues so I can spend my time coding instead of struggling to fix mostly other people's mistakes. And really, in this age of python wheels, containers, virtual environments, and fragmented APIs, the cognitive load of doing this by hand would shut me down for the day.
I think it was a mistake to add this much complexity to the world of software in the first place, so I'd view AI as a bandaid to a problem rather than addressing the underyling issue. But on the whole, the cost of all this extra complexity, data centers to run AI to fix layers of crud and buildup don't seem to provide much of a net benefit to society (except to those who are at the top and need to see growth to pad their retirement portfolios).
Oh no disagreement that it was a mistake, but as Ambassador Kosh once stated "The avalanche has started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote."
I would suggest not concluding the end of this movie from the first 5 minutes of the story. But then, I really fought against complexity over my career and lost hard. One can either check out as a fossil of the good old days or adapt to the new reality. 6 months ago, AI was about to replace all the engineers and then reality slapped the C-suite hard on that subject as just one recent plot twist.
It's not 5 minutes into this story, I think. It's been going on for a long time, but really started to become a "conscious entity" with computers - and I do think computers were a mistake.
Your job would be so much harder without those supposedly complex tools. Most of those listed help solve issues with multiple environments. What simple solution is there to that.
Ya this is exactly how I use it, the LLM does everything i don't want to do. Which is basically everything except the exact code im writing. Its very freeing to not have to worry or touch a jira ticket ever again. The LLM just does it for me.
I was getting frothy and feeling stress due to juggling sessions. I switched to managing my backlog (Obsidian base), writing specs, launching agents in the background. I review and make changes,merge and release.
It's a fixed cycle and I optimize to maintain relaxed engagement.
Rate of features and fixes went up a lot.
I will never believe the premise of 100x boost from AI, why are we still pushing this narative? Yes, AI is amazing in small, constrained, focused pieces of code but the code is nowhere fit for production and the last 10% needed to ship shows that the 90% that's already been done by AI is absolutely trash. Hacks on top of hacks.
Is no one trying to ship polished things to customers anymore, will each of us have a hacky, bugged version of the same thing with different quirks?
--
My first ever software project even before I worked as a swe had less bugs and frictions than all recent projects where AI was used. Some people like mitchellh seem to know what they are doing (I have not taken a look at ghostty's codebase as it's in zig) so I sometimes get the feeling I'm holding it wrong but in the end everyone around me seems to have similar problems with shipping.
I'm not sure that AI helps us with that last 1%. Just the 99% which is why, instead of having a backlog of 0% projects, we have a backlog of 99% projects. My hope is that we're more effective prioritizing a backlog of 99% projects than 0% projects.
I'm actually not feeling the 'burnout', though I too have a bunch of projects sitting at various levels of vibe-completeness. Mostly one just kind of yanks on my attention a bit more than the others and so they end up getting a little neglected. I'm fine with it though, I love having all these little forever projects of mine finally coming to life. My worry is kindof the opposite, what happens when I've finished all the things. Will I run out of ideas? I hope not, but already some of my pet projects have reached a level of completeness where I just cannot see anymore to add, for me they have reached a level of done. That frees me up for the next project but what if I run out of projects!
It's wild we're seeing people rediscover the same solution to the same problems we've had forever: being precious about your darlings.
Code generators reduced the friction for implementing every shitty idea someone has ever had, but because developers seem to have never experienced throwing shitty ideas away (because if it was written in code it _has_ to be important right?) they treat everything coming out of the Codegen as a precious idea that eventually builds up to clutter one's brain leading to Implementation Fatigue the author experienced. The solution? Go through that same process but focus on one idea at a time and make it good.
It does make me wonder if the people experiencing this had hobbies outside of software engineering (let's say, anything creative) they'd be able to spot the signs earlier.
Funny. In writing, the advice is to "kill your darlings". Don't let a particular paragraph that you love a lot stop the whole story because it doesnt fit.
Appreciate the quote of the Essentialism book by Greg McKweon, which I am currently reading. Funnily enough I decided the book when I found out (on Imprint app) that one of the key values of the “essentialist” is playfulness. I was sold.
It's good that you clearly see the "Great Idea" spam for what it is. That comes from the reinforcement-learning human-feedback (RLHF) that is used to keep you coming back for one more pull.
I launched 1 side project that could potentially help my main project every week, for the last couple of months. To me, it’s not draining at all. I love that the main barrier, time, has been removed. The nagging feeling that I am missing out, did not try, should be working on something, seeing competitors launch my idea. All gone.
I love it. Will any of them succeed? It’s early days, but seeing potentially life changing growth in multiple areas at once gives me a lot of energy.
Keep in mind that if a large mass of people experience a boost in activity and energy to explore new topics, those at the top will simultaneously want to use up all that energy by making us work harder as well. The end result only seems like a benefit to you because the other side of the equation hasn't caught up.
> So logically, if AI can help us complete tasks 2-100x faster than before, we should be UNDERWORKED and experiencing ZERO burnout, right?
No. you got lied to by AI bros. 100x times the code (that if you burn enough tokens that you could actually hire someone to go thru your ideas and make them...) is not 100x times the productivity
That's not the reason, the reason is that you get paid for eight hours, and that's how much you'll work, regardless of the number of tasks you complete in those hours.
This seems very related to a trend I’m seeing as my company goes all in on AI: everyone thinks that every problem is “a couple hours” with AI now, and they all want zero external dependencies because they can move faster alone. As a result, we’re now in an even worse “yet-another-…” age where everyone has built approximately the same (but somehow incompatible) versions of all the same beginner-level software, and (ironically) while they want no external dependencies they’re also pushing for org-level mandates to require everyone else to use their solution. Meanwhile, no one wants to do the slow/bottleneck part that cant easily be automated or scaled; they just throw an “agent” at it and call it done—but there’s nothing _there_. You can trust the agent on easy tasks and you can’t trust it on hard ones, but you can’t tell which ones are easy or hard. Improvements in foundation model tech move thresholds of the problem but can’t eliminate it.
Long story short, I think we’re in a phase where the organizational value function is lagging behind the tech. A “proof of concept” used to be correlated with “proof of work” and some amount of domain understanding, but I think now what we need is a focus on “proof of understanding” or else you’re probably just wasting tokens on a baby version of the problem. A decent proxy right now is that if you have zero external dependencies then your solution is probably a toy.
> they’re also pushing for org-level mandates to require everyone else to use their solution.
That's how you get promotions when you don't do anything valuable lol ok done with the cynicism
Not cynicism, incentives. Everything is shaped by incentives. We make movies about heroes and martyrs because they're 0.001% of us.
We need a Proof of Original Product (“POOP”) to de-shittify the AI web.
I call it fighting shit with POOP.
problem is that no one knows what to build and there are way too many ppl employed
I’m seeing kinda the opposite. At some point it becomes obvious what to build and there’s no friction to building it anymore. So you get a flood of low effort copies of the same thing and no one wants to depend on anyone else, and the old value function was that ownership matters. I think the new value function needs to be much more focused on outcomes—and ownership isn’t an outcome.
This is huge... At least from what I've seen, many companies (even if they don't know it) are largely sloppy R&D shops. Most people are on projects that are highly speculative and unlikely to generate revenue. But it often isn't framed that way. Everyone believes their project is the obvious way forward.
In my side hustle time, I use coding agents to explore what if projects I would otherwise never get to build.
At my day job, I use AI to fix config, container, and installation issues so I can spend my time coding instead of struggling to fix mostly other people's mistakes. And really, in this age of python wheels, containers, virtual environments, and fragmented APIs, the cognitive load of doing this by hand would shut me down for the day.
1.5 years in and I haven't burnt out. If anything, I'm ramping up. I'm no longer afraid of adding a web UI, or insane numbers of unit tests, or deploying other people's software.
What I'm not doing is using it to build products, but instead just doing so to augment the supporting stack. All of this is subject to change as the AI landscape evolves.
That's exactly what the article highlight might actually put your "competitors" (if you see others like that) in front of you, as focus and "what you actually did" becomes more important. Might be that while you shipped and experimented with 50 different APIs, your "competitor"/peer just did 3, but they were more carefully considered so the payoff ended up bigger/better, in whatever way that could be.
That's how I understood the article at least.
My biggest struggle is UI. I can make functional, but my design skills couldn't sell water to someone in death valley
Pick a website you like, and tell claude to use it for inspiration. I do this all the time and the results are pretty impressive and different than what you get out of the box prompting.
> Pick a website you like, and tell claude to use it for inspiration.
I believe you misspelled "rip it off."
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that people are using the tools built by ripping off the collective creative works of humanity to rip off individual things, too.
Steve Jobs said something about good and great artists.
> Steve Jobs said something about good and great artists.
Picasso said that, Jobs quoted it (and to his credit, gave attribution... which I doubt is happening with all of these claude-cloned designs).
When other people emulate your behavior because they appreciate the results you got, we used to call that leadership. Something has gone awry that we now call it a ripoff.
Emulating your _behavior_ is completely different from imitating your _output_.
> At my day job, I use AI to fix config, container, and installation issues so I can spend my time coding instead of struggling to fix mostly other people's mistakes. And really, in this age of python wheels, containers, virtual environments, and fragmented APIs, the cognitive load of doing this by hand would shut me down for the day.
I think it was a mistake to add this much complexity to the world of software in the first place, so I'd view AI as a bandaid to a problem rather than addressing the underyling issue. But on the whole, the cost of all this extra complexity, data centers to run AI to fix layers of crud and buildup don't seem to provide much of a net benefit to society (except to those who are at the top and need to see growth to pad their retirement portfolios).
Oh no disagreement that it was a mistake, but as Ambassador Kosh once stated "The avalanche has started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote."
I would suggest not concluding the end of this movie from the first 5 minutes of the story. But then, I really fought against complexity over my career and lost hard. One can either check out as a fossil of the good old days or adapt to the new reality. 6 months ago, AI was about to replace all the engineers and then reality slapped the C-suite hard on that subject as just one recent plot twist.
It's not 5 minutes into this story, I think. It's been going on for a long time, but really started to become a "conscious entity" with computers - and I do think computers were a mistake.
Your job would be so much harder without those supposedly complex tools. Most of those listed help solve issues with multiple environments. What simple solution is there to that.
AI as an expensive bandaid
Ya this is exactly how I use it, the LLM does everything i don't want to do. Which is basically everything except the exact code im writing. Its very freeing to not have to worry or touch a jira ticket ever again. The LLM just does it for me.
I was getting frothy and feeling stress due to juggling sessions. I switched to managing my backlog (Obsidian base), writing specs, launching agents in the background. I review and make changes,merge and release. It's a fixed cycle and I optimize to maintain relaxed engagement. Rate of features and fixes went up a lot.
I will never believe the premise of 100x boost from AI, why are we still pushing this narative? Yes, AI is amazing in small, constrained, focused pieces of code but the code is nowhere fit for production and the last 10% needed to ship shows that the 90% that's already been done by AI is absolutely trash. Hacks on top of hacks.
Is no one trying to ship polished things to customers anymore, will each of us have a hacky, bugged version of the same thing with different quirks?
--
My first ever software project even before I worked as a swe had less bugs and frictions than all recent projects where AI was used. Some people like mitchellh seem to know what they are doing (I have not taken a look at ghostty's codebase as it's in zig) so I sometimes get the feeling I'm holding it wrong but in the end everyone around me seems to have similar problems with shipping.
I'm not sure that AI helps us with that last 1%. Just the 99% which is why, instead of having a backlog of 0% projects, we have a backlog of 99% projects. My hope is that we're more effective prioritizing a backlog of 99% projects than 0% projects.
I'm actually not feeling the 'burnout', though I too have a bunch of projects sitting at various levels of vibe-completeness. Mostly one just kind of yanks on my attention a bit more than the others and so they end up getting a little neglected. I'm fine with it though, I love having all these little forever projects of mine finally coming to life. My worry is kindof the opposite, what happens when I've finished all the things. Will I run out of ideas? I hope not, but already some of my pet projects have reached a level of completeness where I just cannot see anymore to add, for me they have reached a level of done. That frees me up for the next project but what if I run out of projects!
Then just set aside some time to be bored. People generate some of their best ideas during this time.
The one thing I miss about driving to work.
Get another hobby like gardening?
It's wild we're seeing people rediscover the same solution to the same problems we've had forever: being precious about your darlings.
Code generators reduced the friction for implementing every shitty idea someone has ever had, but because developers seem to have never experienced throwing shitty ideas away (because if it was written in code it _has_ to be important right?) they treat everything coming out of the Codegen as a precious idea that eventually builds up to clutter one's brain leading to Implementation Fatigue the author experienced. The solution? Go through that same process but focus on one idea at a time and make it good.
It does make me wonder if the people experiencing this had hobbies outside of software engineering (let's say, anything creative) they'd be able to spot the signs earlier.
Funny. In writing, the advice is to "kill your darlings". Don't let a particular paragraph that you love a lot stop the whole story because it doesnt fit.
Appreciate the quote of the Essentialism book by Greg McKweon, which I am currently reading. Funnily enough I decided the book when I found out (on Imprint app) that one of the key values of the “essentialist” is playfulness. I was sold.
> Now that AI makes things 2-100x more efficient
What things, why, and how did you measure this?
op probly sucked at writing code in 2022 and now has the illusion that he is suddenly able to.
thing is that writing software wasnt that hard even in 2022 with all the cloud, frameworks and stuff
I totally agreed with Rick. A.I is a rabbit hole revealer. And it encourages me to go down them with its "Great Idea" spam.
Edit: Reveler vs Revealer
It's good that you clearly see the "Great Idea" spam for what it is. That comes from the reinforcement-learning human-feedback (RLHF) that is used to keep you coming back for one more pull.
I launched 1 side project that could potentially help my main project every week, for the last couple of months. To me, it’s not draining at all. I love that the main barrier, time, has been removed. The nagging feeling that I am missing out, did not try, should be working on something, seeing competitors launch my idea. All gone.
I love it. Will any of them succeed? It’s early days, but seeing potentially life changing growth in multiple areas at once gives me a lot of energy.
Keep in mind that if a large mass of people experience a boost in activity and energy to explore new topics, those at the top will simultaneously want to use up all that energy by making us work harder as well. The end result only seems like a benefit to you because the other side of the equation hasn't caught up.
AI slop.
> So logically, if AI can help us complete tasks 2-100x faster than before, we should be UNDERWORKED and experiencing ZERO burnout, right?
No. you got lied to by AI bros. 100x times the code (that if you burn enough tokens that you could actually hire someone to go thru your ideas and make them...) is not 100x times the productivity
That's not the reason, the reason is that you get paid for eight hours, and that's how much you'll work, regardless of the number of tasks you complete in those hours.
Ah, you're not on salary in the US, I take it.