Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

There is a fundamentally unfortunate reality here which is quite problematic.

Namely, you don’t deserve to be paid for working 8 hours if you only worked for 30 minutes over an eight hour period.

I don’t care if you personally agree with that or not, the reality is that businesses believe it.

That means, sooner or later there will be a great rebalancing where people will be required to do significantly more work; probably the work of other developers who will be fired.

It’s fun for home projects; but the somewhat depressing reality is that there is no chance in hell this (sitting around for 7 hours a day reading reddit while Claude codes) will fly in corporate environments; instead, you’re looking at mass layoffs.

So. Enjoy it while you can folks.

In the future you’ll be spending that 8 hours struggling to juggle the context and review 20 different tasks, not playing with your kids.

Playing with your kids, aka increasing their IQ and investing in the future.

Twas always such. Until we build a system where necessities are cheap (housing scarcity is a self-imposed own goal for one) we will be in constant competition with our peers so the value we produce can be extracted by casual owners.

"deserve" has nothing to do with it.

It doesn’t matter what downtime task it is.

You won’t have time to do it; it’s naive and ridiculous to expect that businesses will just let people goof off for 7 hours a day.

Regardless of the output they generate.

Anyone who doesn’t believe this has never had to manage budgets and staff.

It’s the “AI utopia” people making vague hand wavey motions about post-scarcity.

I am hopeful that AI leads to a future with mandatory 10 hour work weeks.

Why would that happen when they can have mandatory 50 hour work weeks?

> sooner or later there will be a great rebalancing where people will be required to do significantly more work; probably the work of other developers who will be fired.

this already started in 2022-23 with all the layoffs and "downsizing"

If human productivity and unemployment increases at the same time the obvious solution for regulators will be to decrease the work week from 5 to 4 days or even further

> That means, sooner or later there will be a great rebalancing where people will be required to do significantly more work; probably the work of other developers who will be fired.

Correct - covered here in my talk - https://ghuntley.com/six-month-recap/

AI isn't going to take anyone's jobs. Your co-worker who knows how to use multiple agents at a time and automates their job function will.

You only work 5 days?

People keep thinking the Jetsons is going to happen.

Soylent Green is a lot closer to the reality of capitalism.

Mass unemployment with some people working 50+ hours a week will have to lead to something changing. Capped work hours? UBI?

Man you struck a nerve with this one. All these devs want to believe they are still going to get paid $200k a year working 30mins a day. The reality is we will be spending the same 8 hours a day, be paid less, but now we need to work on 16 projects at the same time.

You are living in a fantasy land if you think any technology (besides maybe a replicator) will lead to less work. If that were the case we'd all be on a 10 hour work week already.