Christofer Sjögren

AI makes your work harder, not easier. I think of it as work density—the percent of time spent expending brain cells. The denser the work, the more exhausting it is. If you have 10 agents running at once, you have 10x the context swaps, each of which requires recovery time. The more density, the higher the recovery time. When you don't take time to recover, you burn out. Working with multiple agents is worse than normal multitasking because you're juggling more tasks. There's nothing new about this. I can't think of a single "time-saving" workplace technology that saved anybody any time. Instead, it forces us to work harder. It increases density. The problem is compounded by moronic management that fires people because of the tech. In practice, firing 50% of your staff means that the remaining 50% have to do twice the work in the same time. It's exhausting. The utopian notion that AI will create leisure time is complete BS. It will just force us to cram more work into the time we have. We need to just stop frantically pushing, pushing, pushing for more and more output and relax. It takes a conscious effort to counter that effect, so make the effort. You will not be "more productive" once you burn out.

Software developers make easy scapegoats because people don't know or understand what we do. The move, in some circles, to eliminate developers entirely stems directly from that ignorance. They don't understand what we do, so they imagine it's easy (and easily replaced by AI). Wrong on both counts. It's not about the coding. We, of course, make matters worse by not going out of our way to be more visible and accessible.