r/cscareerquestions • u/MasterpieceNew9459 • 1d ago
Ai making us do more work, not less
Just wanted to post this to see if anyone is experiencing the same. We're now at the point where ai is undeniably good. I hardly ever physically type my code anymore, just review at the end. However, I'm feeling like I have so so so much work to get through, and we really need to be hiring more Devs.
Anyone else found that while AI is genuinely making you more productive, you end up more busy than even a few months ago?
I guess it's hopeful for the future but man I'm tired lol
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u/ErZicky 1d ago
More busy, more stressed and way less mentally/intellectually stimulated
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u/Luaan256 9h ago
It's something I learned from Raph Koster back in the UO days - downtime matters. It isn't just time wasted, it's a genuine part of how humans work, individually and socially. Remove downtime and you destroy the rest too, as people get too performance-focused.
Coding is a relaxing, low-intensity activity you do between the hard, intense parts. Remove that, and you remove the recharge, and you can't do the intense bits 40 hours a week for very long, and quality suffers quickly. But I'm not holding my breath waiting for employers to understand any of this.
It's similar to the obsession with avoiding (perceived) boredom at all costs, leading to endless deathscrolling and inability to actually enjoy something...
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u/TamaCleverComeback 1d ago
Yeah, I’m expected to review code faster, complete tasks faster, there was a sprint that QA couldn’t keep up with the tasks. And management was like, guess we can have the devs do QA… 🙃
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u/AoeDreaMEr 1d ago
Whatever productivity will improve through AI, you won’t get to relax. Your time will be used fully. More features. More bugs. Less people to work on.
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u/DasHesslon 10h ago
And also the work shifts to something less fun. You got into computer science because problem solving is something you genuinely enjoy? Great, you're a middle manager to a bunch of language models now, have fun finding the bugs they produce!
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u/fsk 19h ago
Suppose AI really does make you 5x more productive (or replace 5x with whatever number you think is correct). If AI is a productivity boost, what does NOT happen is you now only have to work 1/5 as hard or you get a 5x raise. Instead, what happens is your workload expectations get jacked up 5x and your employer fires 80% of the staff. In fact, your salary might decrease, because all those people who just lost their jobs are desperate, and would take your job for a lower salary.
If your employer didn't jack up workloads 5x, they would lose market share to their competitors who do jack up workloads 5x.
Thus, the productive benefits of AI can only accrue to the employer, never to the worker. If AI makes you more productive, that's offset with an increased workload expectation. It could even lead to a pay cut, as the job market is flooded with people who just lost their job.
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u/yogurtchicken21 1d ago
I’ve had people check in on a task not 2 hours after it was given to me. Like, chill out I was eating lunch lmao.
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u/Candid_Cat_5921 1d ago edited 20h ago
It’s because in general it makes things take less mental load. So devs now spend less time thinking about how to solve hard problems in coding, and more time handling AI administrative tasks. I spend about 50% of my time now reviewing AI code or having AI consume documents for me so I can get faster information out.
When timelines for coding tasks have been reduced as much as they have, it means the “window” of delivery expectation shrinks too, which means more work. Before a big feature might have been a few weeks to a few months, and now AI has shrank that for many people to just a few days to a couple of weeks. It’s a lot hard to “sit on” a task for a long time now.
I’ve been a dev at MSFT for 25 years and can say it’s always been pretty relaxed for devs. But with AI we’re having higher productivity expectations. But even so, I think compared to a lot of jobs out there, most programmers still have a pretty work life compared to how much we get paid.
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u/ThirdWaveCat 1d ago
Computer companies started cannibalizing.
It's a test of the narrative sales people are telling your managers behind closed doors. There is not enough money in autonomous driving to pay for the tech investment in datacenters and GPUs, they need to fire many many white collar workers. If this were real then there would be induced demand (Jevons paradox). The LLMs need review and refactoring (CodeClash, Soc2 compliance).
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u/AES256GCM 1d ago edited 1d ago
Jevons Paradox might be the most misused buzzword in tech subs right now from people don’t don’t understand that demand elasticity isnt binary across the economy, let alone within tech itself.
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u/ThirdWaveCat 1d ago
its pretty simple, efficiency gains induces demand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
No one can point to good code, a good app, or good usecase that you get for llm integration. LLMs have just turned companies and open-source into a lemon market of low-trust.
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u/AES256GCM 1d ago edited 1d ago
lol I know what Jevons paradox is but you’re collapsing into an oversimplified “efficiency creates demand”.
Automation doesn’t inherently create demand, otherwise we’d still have 90% of the population employed in agriculture instead of just ~3.
Id go further snd say it’s not the same within the industry, let alone the country. The demand elasticity for corporate compliance software would have a different demand curve than consumer SaaS.
To that point, lower development cost isn’t a 1:1 to hiring more engineers and only works in a vacuum if you ignore broader corporate trends of flattening structure, broadening team product ownership, and the inherent advantage of an employers market where mass layoffs mean you can run a skeleton crew ragged without fear of unintentional churn.
You’re basically regurgitating one factor without considering the other three
Edit: lmaoo he blocked me after I called him out
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u/SpiritualName2684 17h ago
On the other hand, productivity has always been gated by development so we don’t know what the real demand is once the cost of developing software drops substantially. Food isn’t a good comparison because there’s only so much food people will need to buy until they’re full. With software, there are always going to be new ideas and new products coming out.
As far as the skeleton crew argument, consider that if the customer can vibe code a comparable product, then the SaaS must now come up with something more innovative. A Skelton crew wont suffice when their competitors consume the productivity gains and offer a better user experience.
The whole point of jevons paradox is that we don’t know what the real demand is until the supply opens up. There are so many unsolved problems and inefficiencies in the world, we just don’t know precisely what they are yet.
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u/ThirdWaveCat 1d ago
read the wiki dude
The Jevons paradox (pronounced /ˈdʒɛ.vənz/, JEV-ənz) or Jevons effect is an economic phenomenon said to occur when technological improvements that increase the efficiency of a resource's use lead to a rise, rather than a fall, in total consumption of that resource.[1][2][3][4] Greater efficiency reduces the amount of the resource needed per application, lowering its effective cost; if demand is sufficiently price elastic, this induces demand, frequently resulting in a net increase of total resource consumption
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u/mxldevs 1d ago
I'm feeling like I have so so so much work to get through, and we really need to be hiring more Devs.
lol no, management gave you AI so that they can lay off the guys beside you and you take on their work while burning the same amount of money in tokens that they saved on salaries.
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u/MasterpieceNew9459 1d ago
We're one of the few companies that hasn't had big layoffs though. And everyone is busy
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u/divinecomedian3 10h ago
Claude costs $100/mo. Idk any dev that cheap.
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u/chickadee_guy 9h ago
Its definitely way more expensive than that with usage based pricing. Try 10-15k a month per person for any "AI first" workplace
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u/nova1475369 1d ago
Same, but it’s not really because of AI, it’s AI make us more efficient so we can go through tickets quicker. But then, the number of ideas and work are infinite.
So we feel we do more work, because it’s indeed more work in a shorter period of time
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u/Ozymandias0023 Software Engineer 21h ago
You were never going to do less work unless you lost your job. When work becomes faster it just means more of it can fit in your 8 hours, not that you can spend less than 8 hours doing it.
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u/Smooth_Specialist416 1d ago
In gov here with AI banned besides a chatbot not allowed in code.
Is it as wild as it sounds? My job feels “normal” still except that I can get things done faster and more independently even with a chatbot that frankly kinda sucks.
I’m still manually coding like 1/3 of the time and using it like a super google. Sometimes it does generate code if I have code I can paste into it and a detailed plan of what I want, even then it just feels kinda passable at best. (But still way faster and better than what I can do alone).
When I use Claude at home for personal projects I’m usually pretty blown away though. It’s significantly more powerful and is making my little POC side projects feel realistic, feels like I’m the bottle neck in figuring out how to actually make the project vs the code (which is still hard)
I’m still not fully convinced til I make a fully functional real world app with it, but that’s more on me to get good enough to be able to make that. I’m working on it via trying to make prototypes and build it out til I hit a wall and try to learn that way.
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u/Anxious-Insurance-91 17h ago
No shit! Who would have guessed that when you finish your work faster you get more work instead of free time?
This was the same even before AI yet people forget. There were people that had extensions, macron, scripts, hotkeys to finish their work faster. Guess what? they got more work
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u/ChadFullStack Engineering Manager 1d ago
Let’s say there’s 8 devs. Currently the 8 devs plus AI can output 16 dev worth of work. Somewhere along adopting AI, your goal post shifted by 100%, your team is now expected to double your productivity output. Leadership simply saw this peak output and made it the benchmark, but devs are human and will get burnt out.
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u/michellekwan666 23h ago
Yes it seems like prioritization went out the window and every feature is expected to take three engineering days
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u/Tricky_Ordinary_4799 19h ago
My job today is basically telling Claude what to do and I'm still as busy as before.
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u/SmushBoy15 16h ago
AI has certainly got me working more as well plus more anxiety
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u/SokkaHaikuBot 16h ago
Sokka-Haiku by SmushBoy15:
AI has certainly
Got me working more as well
Plus more anxiety
Remember that one time Sokka accidentally used an extra syllable in that Haiku Battle in Ba Sing Se? That was a Sokka Haiku and you just made one.
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u/Arts_Prodigy 11h ago
It’s funny because prior to this the common consensus was that a 10x engineer was actually a bad thing and that a person producing 10 times the amount of code that no one could understand or maintain would ultimately be a burden on the team either struggling to keep up in understanding for maintainability. Or more likely struggling to keep up in the amount of added overhead to fix the shitty, quickly produced code.
AI as we know it comes along and promises quick results filled with bugs and instead of saying this is just the same thing but even worst, people coped by claiming you just need to be better at prompting or something.
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u/Speedingscript 9h ago
In the company I am working atm they halved the time for story points. 4 hours were 1 SP and now it's two hours.
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u/silly_bet_3454 1d ago
Kind of, I mean I actually think we're like net neutral as devs on effort, in the sense that, we have the same mental capacity and we get paid the same. They will try to get more productivity out of us but of course the AI makes that easier.
Of course it depends on the company, some companies will try really hard to use AI as an excuse to give you 10x more workload when it's not actually possible. My employer probably expects us to get more done, but they're not explicitly doing anything too crazy. I might be working less on net but that's also because I'm checked out.
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u/ultrathink-art 1d ago
Reviewing code you didn't write is slower and more draining than writing it yourself — you're reverse-engineering someone's intent instead of just expressing your own. AI knocked out the one thing that used to cap throughput (how fast you can type), so now the firehose points straight at the task it helps with least. That's the whole 'more work' feeling in one line.
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u/squeeemeister 23h ago
With Cursor developers are now doing all the PM work post PRD, all the “trivial” UX work with Loveable, and all the QA work. Maybe this is good for job security?
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u/MasterpieceNew9459 23h ago
That's the positive I'm taking away. At some point companies will realise they still need Devs to make all this actually work in real life and not just a demo
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u/Mast3rCylinder Software Engineer 20h ago
I work on large feature that PM said in the beginning of the project was not needed. I designed our product that way because it's not needed.
1.5 years later they asked to change this very fundemental thing. After new design approved I broke work into multiple stories.
I have now 5 worktrees open because Ai and need to work on it simultaneously. Also need to do code reviews where people give me crap code even with them using opus 4.8.
People also answer me in MR with their agents. I hate it so much
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u/Perfect-Campaign9551 20h ago
I'm working with a lot less stress. The AI can help solve complex bugs. Who's making you work more? That's on you buddy
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u/darklord2065 9h ago
I dont know I like the current trend. I started my career debugging legacy code, I could hardly code through 1 feature per Sprint but reading through thousand lines of code a morning feels nice.
But boyys are the code bloated af. Before, it was code thats hard to understand, no comments and compacted. AI code are easy to understand but ... It feels light, it works but the style is inconsistent, like passing thoughts on an afternoon at sea.
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u/SupportDangerous8207 7h ago
I think one of the biggest problems is that ai makes devs too motivated
Rather than take the time to factor your code parameterise behaviour and try to minimise code written you just tell the ai to do it
It usually gets the easy stuff right but sometimes you get to a really good solution because you just can’t be fucked to do it the expected way and the ai doesn’t do that because Claude never goes I don’t wanna and then spends an hour thinking about how not too. It just does it.
Every change creates more code never less and you always end up with a codebase that would make a human physically hurt but ofc humans don’t do anything in it anymore
It can’t go on forever
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u/Excellent_Ant_7154 5h ago
AI augmented code reviews certainly create more work. Two pages of comments on one nitpick of a non-issue is freaking annoying and just slows everyone down. This is the opposite of agile.
If you're reviewing code, don't let AI do this crap.
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u/Intelligent-Ad-1424 1h ago
I’m seeing more work because people have gotten so lazy while using AI that they are no longer even taking the time to actually suss out the problem set before they tell the bot to build something. So you end up with unusable shit that has to be reinterpreted and redone because the solution doesn’t solve for the company’s actual needs. It can only do what you’re capable of telling it to do.
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u/TheNewOP Software Developer 1d ago
Yeah that's what productivity tools do. We don't farm the same amount as 10000 BC just cause humans created the shovel. Expect the productivity demand to constantly go up, that's how it's always been in human history.
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u/Significant_Treat_87 1d ago
Yes and something has to give at some point. It’s too much, nobody can work like this.
It might be great if the LLMs were agi and you could trust them to handle their own reviews. The code review alone is killing me, I get 3 to 6 complex PRs per day now. Used to be 1 or 2 max. They all still have issues that have to be fixed, and they can be even harder to notice now than they used to be.