you never worked more before because considering AI-Based coding you're extremely more efficient in every task you accomplish. Everything is solved faster, and that makes more problems to come. It's like an unevitable escalation. Such putting your pedal on full gas without knowing how to leave it from there.
jackdaniel · 2026-10-27 12:36:38 UTC
or the cognitive strain from trying to understand and rubberstamp a word salad is bigger than working through problems
metobehonest · 2026-10-27 13:54:57 UTC
I feel this. Thinking about the domain, typing a bit, maybe having a new idea while I'm eating on a break now feels like a memory of heaven. Today I'm constantly going over painful "grilling" sessions where I have to read mountains of dense prose where each word maps to some "glossary" from previously generated docs and figure out what is overengineered bullshit and what is actually necessary.
zazibar · 2026-10-27 12:37:31 UTC
Stay in school.
thatsabadlook · 2026-10-27 12:50:02 UTC
No. Actually some things take longer and lead to worse outcomes. AI tools invent problems and find work for themselves while also failing at their stated tasks in opaque ways all the damn time. It's obnoxious and why so many repos are stupidly large for no good reason.
sailfast · 2026-10-27 12:30:46 UTC
This tracks with my experience. The other bit that contributes here is that upstream inputs using AI also get faster - so you’re basically speeding up the entire machine but you’re still a human.
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 · 2026-10-27 12:53:14 UTC
They aren’t paying more for productivity because they themselves aren’t earning more for productivity. The elephant in the room is that customers don’t have any more money to spend. Certainly not in this economy.
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.
sailfast · 2026-10-27 14:02:49 UTC
While that is true, I find that in a small company / startup environment you are almost always working on something that will contribute to revenue. The list is long. And you don’t have that much time for nonsense if you’re doing it right.
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 · 2026-10-27 14:51:07 UTC
I once would have said that about startups, but lately I’ve been working at a very small one and I’ve seen with my own eyes how agentic coding rapidly undermined the company’s ability to effectively prioritize. It has basically killed the correlation between initial planning/development cost and ongoing support/maintenance cost. And it had developers implementing things so quickly that the product manager couldn’t keep up, which meant that he was basically just approving everything, including the half baked ideas, just to avoid coming under pressure for stalling the development pipeline.
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.
citrin_ru · 2026-10-27 12:32:04 UTC
AI give employers immense leverage - by threading with AI layoffs they can exploit workers and in the current job market many have nowhere to go.
logicchains · 2026-10-27 12:46:31 UTC
AI also gives employees much more leverage than before, as they no longer need a large team to compete with BigCos at knowledge work. It's never been cheaper to start a software business.
causal · 2026-10-27 12:51:14 UTC
I have been pondering whether I am a fool to continue to go it as an employee in the age of AI.
esseph · 2026-10-27 12:53:02 UTC
Might be just as bad, possibly worse, if you aren't BigCo.
flir · 2026-10-27 12:54:48 UTC
It was never the coding that was hard, it was always the marketing.
jaynetics · 2026-10-27 13:09:54 UTC
At least for us dev types.
random_cat_8745 · 2026-10-27 13:16:48 UTC
and infrastructure, it can be costly
prmph · 2026-10-27 13:37:21 UTC
The coding is hard, unless by coding you mean slapping together CRUD forms. Many businesses are undone or fail to grow properly by neglecting this. This refrain that everything about starting a software business is hard except the coding needs to die.
If the coding was nothing, every good marketing guy could go solo and start large software businesses. It does not happen. You mostly see successful technical founders, or usually a marriage of technical and business cofounders.
Finding a fit between viable business opportunities and the tech to address it is what's hard, and requires several skills: technical, marketing, communication, product design, etc.
Buttons840 · 2026-10-27 13:28:02 UTC
I wonder how much companies would pay people to NOT replicate their products. Like, if I'm just hacking around with my LLM, and am approaching a near 100% drop-in replacement for the entire Atlassian suite--how much would they pay me to NOT do that? Is that worth 1 livable wage to them?
There's an alternate employment arrangement...
causal · 2026-10-27 13:59:45 UTC
The install base is worth way more than the software
soon_to_be_sb · 2026-10-27 12:54:40 UTC
> It's never been cheaper to start a software business.
99.99% of software business is marketing..lol
gosub100 · 2026-10-27 12:55:04 UTC
Cheaper now that they are running AI services at a loss.
citrin_ru · 2026-10-27 15:17:20 UTC
The loss is from model training. Serving an open-weight model is profitable and these models are already good enough for many tasks. If Anthorpic/OpenAI will try to recover training investments with higher prices they'll loose the volume (and given infra spending commencements they need the volume). So I don't expect any significant price increase.
debazel · 2026-10-27 12:57:16 UTC
The side effect of this is also that the value of software itself has never been lower, so starting a new software business isn't very attractive in today's market.
trollbridge · 2026-10-27 13:03:39 UTC
The skillset needed to be a productive employee who is, say, a programmer is not the same at all as the skillset to run an entire business.
For example, skills with sales are far more important than actual software engineering.
iugtmkbdfil834 · 2026-10-27 13:26:13 UTC
Sales and, shudders, marketing. I am not joking. As much as I hate to say it, my personal opinion is that this is the 'safe' spot now.
otikik · 2026-10-27 14:01:50 UTC
AI is definetly taking a big portion of the marketing budget as well.
Just today I was served a clearly AI-generated Halloween ad for Coca-Cola.
logicchains · 2026-10-27 15:29:46 UTC
Yes, but before you needed someone good at sales and a team of programmers, now you just need a buddy good at sales.
bmurphy1976 · 2026-10-27 15:01:10 UTC
It cheaper to create one-off products. Creating a sustainable business though? Charging money for the product or service? Actually getting enough income to thrive? I think that also just got a lot harder. Sure, you quit and you undermined BigCo with your open source release, but somebody with even less to lose will now undermine you.
bdcravens · 2026-10-27 12:52:03 UTC
Scarier than that is the idea of replacing you with someone far cheaper who can drive the AI.
tonyedgecombe · 2026-10-27 13:00:24 UTC
Yeah, all those losers in the office that couldn't find their way out of a paper bag suddenly look as productive as you do.
KeplerBoy · 2026-10-27 13:15:55 UTC
They actually don't. A lot of people still have no clue how to drive these tools.
doctorwho42 · 2026-10-27 16:40:08 UTC
Honestly I think that is more of a symptom of how slapped together the AI software stacks feel to an outsider.
All my dev friends swear this is the future, all my scientist coworkers just say it's a useful tool.
I have heard the pitch and have people explained how it works... But I have yet been handed a guide on how to set myself up properly to get the most out of AI. Like I have both a corporate openai gui agent as well as cli setup with a monthly allotment of tokens. But there is no clear standard guide on how I should be setting things up, like we do for python in books "here are the building blocks for python"/aka learn python the hard way
iugtmkbdfil834 · 2026-10-27 13:21:33 UTC
:D As a person who can do both ( and keeps logs of various interesting mishaps in our little corner of the universe ), neither is easy to do well, both require skill and, well, current literacy rates don't exactly make me optimistic.
edit: It is actually kinda funny. One would think that if we would embrace the full spectrum now, we could have the best of both worlds ( logic and language side by side solving humanity's problems ).
edit: conditional syntax
pixl97 · 2026-10-27 13:31:06 UTC
Just remember, it's not how good you are at your job, it's how hungry the person on your way to work is that's willing to split open your head and steal your wallet.
iugtmkbdfil834 · 2026-10-27 13:33:48 UTC
Trust me, the concept of social insurance is not lost on me. Frankly, the fact that we are running into this without considering likely outcomes ( or worse, considering it and plunging without relevant ways to keep people from going crazy ) is.. annoying to me. It shows me our leadership is.. not great.
rakejake · 2026-10-27 16:33:30 UTC
This precisely - AI takes away your leverage as a software engineer. AI models are very well trained at coding today so I'm not sure what further improvement really looks like. But even if humans stick around to guide the AI, I expect the job itself will get more unpleasant because capital/management have no reason to treat this labor class well anymore.
lysace · 2026-10-27 12:39:58 UTC
Did it really promise that? Who pitched that?
warmwaffles · 2026-10-27 12:44:09 UTC
Let me see, Dario, Elon, Altman. Do I need to go on?
frangonf below me brought the receipts too. Unfortunately flagged as [dead]
gram-hours · 2026-10-27 13:28:29 UTC
Folks with massive vested interest. Equivalent to the likes of Henry Ford saying "Don't worry; automobiles won't replace horse-drawn carriages!"
AI needs humans to fill in the gaps at what it's not good at: acquiring and managing large volumes of new information/context. This requires humans to learn faster than ever before, since their projects grow much more rapidly, and to spend far more time managing and switching context, which people generally find unpleasant.
englishspot · 2026-10-27 12:47:31 UTC
the amount of work I get done increased exponentially, but so did the number of things I have to keep track of in my head. it's tempting to just YOLO everything to the AI, but "the AI did it" isn't really an excuse when production goes down.
gregoriol · 2026-10-27 12:51:54 UTC
Same impression here: things "done" are going faster, bigger, more complex, and the head has to keep up
nkrisc · 2026-10-27 12:48:54 UTC
The opening premise baffles me. What kind of illusion must one be under to believe that employers would ever pay you the same amount of money to do less work?
Realistically there were only ever two possible outcomes: you do more work for the same amount of money, or you’re one of the ones who were laid off and your work was transferred to the former.
The only way it will result in less work and the same or better quality of life is if you’re self-employed or are employed by a compassionate human. Sadly that does not apply to the majority of people.
causal · 2026-10-27 12:54:46 UTC
At best all we can do is make knowledge work cheaper right now. But knowledge work was never the bottleneck behind energy prices, food production, transportation, cargo, etc.
KeplerBoy · 2026-10-27 13:10:41 UTC
It kind of was though? It was knowledge work that brought us fertilizers, tractors, trucks and large ships, which in turn made food as abundant as it is today.
Otherwise most of us would still toil on the fields just to harvest a tiny bit more food than our immediate family needs.
qwytw · 2026-10-27 13:27:00 UTC
> It was knowledge work that brought us fertilizers, tractors, trucks and large ships, which
Yes but the number of people who actually worked on the R&D and the amount of time they spent on it is absolutely insignificant on the grand scale of things.
causal · 2026-10-27 14:02:35 UTC
Still not the bottleneck.
trollbridge · 2026-10-27 12:56:04 UTC
We have our own small boutique software type of business, so we aren't dealing with "employers", but all of us have never worked more, and for less (per hour) pay. Customers simply have higher expectations now, and we have to compete globally with basically an entire planet willing to vibe-code things, along with internal pressure at clients of "we can just do this ourselves".
So that means shipping higher quality, faster, with more features, and for a lower end price.
Aurornis · 2026-10-27 15:51:32 UTC
> and we have to compete globally with basically an entire planet
This is the part missing from many of the hot takes about regulating AI: The type of work that AI can do is the most portable globally. You can try to regulate AI or force companies to pay more for AI-assisted labor, but that only works within your borders. A hundred other companies in other countries will be more than happy to come do the work remotely. You can try to regulate that, too, but then the entire products will be built outside of the country.
conception · 2026-10-27 12:57:28 UTC
You are missing a critical third - people organize and via unions or the polls push back and require less work. There is no reason we aren’t working seven days a week beyond people fighting not to.
simias · 2026-10-27 13:02:02 UTC
I'm very pro-union but I feel like at this point attempting to organize will just speed up the process of replacing as many people as possible with machines, not slow it down. It's too little, too late.
I don't understand what kind of society we're building right now. Anthropic and other AI labs at $20T valuations, the 1% monopolizing all the wealth and the rest of us out of a job and fighting for the scraps?
There seems to be some sort of magical thinking within the AI crowd at the moment, that it'll all work itself out in the end.
- Build the God Machine
- ??????
- POST-SCARCITY UTOPIA!
redwood · 2026-10-27 13:06:00 UTC
No one is giving them a 20T valuation. That's an order of magnitude larger than the market is currently targeting
npc99 · 2026-10-27 13:31:18 UTC
They are probably adding up Anthropic + a number of other companies
simias · 2026-10-27 14:13:13 UTC
Yeah that's me making up a big number to evoke an "AI maximalist" future, where automated labor swallows a huge chunk of the economy.
Ar-Curunir · 2026-10-27 13:06:07 UTC
The middle part is most likely that many will die. (This is not an endorsement!)
NoidFonsense · 2026-10-27 14:02:20 UTC
billions must die?
yoyohello13 · 2026-10-27 15:27:06 UTC
This is my prediction. The extractors will continue to extract until it becomes untenable. Then a lot of people will die and we will find a new balance. This cycle is basically human history in a nutshell.
Do those calling for unionization forget how the railroads dealt with workers trying to unionize? Ever heard of the Pinkertons.
thereader12 · 2026-10-27 16:21:00 UTC
They unionized because people were already dying.
donbox · 2026-10-27 13:09:13 UTC
But but but... organizing.. be it in form of democractic/market processes (non-violent or otherwise) can act as a speed breaker.
pixl97 · 2026-10-27 13:16:28 UTC
Hopefully we're not too late.
Large companies have been spending millions in propaganda and attacks to ensure that people in the US think that unions are pure communism. By the time we get enough people to make a difference there may be T100's stepping on our bones at this point.
solyin · 2026-10-27 13:34:57 UTC
The problem is everyone's financial cliff is different. If I lost my job today, I have enough saved up to last me X months. Yours is Y, someone else's is Z. I'm going to go hungry at the end of X plus whatever. But since you're going to go hungry at Y plus whatever, we aren't forced to agree on what the right time to stop and stand up is. Z over there has rich parents so they've got longer. Nevermind poor W over there who doesn't, and has shorter.
What a convenient little trap we've set for ourselves. If everyone's money was set to run out at the same time, there'd be problems.
iugtmkbdfil834 · 2026-10-27 13:12:23 UTC
Maybe, but from simple game theory perspective assuming one assumes this is the end product, union gives at least a chance at favorable outcome.
10111001 · 2026-10-27 13:41:15 UTC
> I'm very pro-union but I feel like at this point attempting to organize will just speed up the process of replacing as many people as possible with machines, not slow it down. It's too little, too late.
Honestly, I think the only shot workers have is unionization plus really aggressive political action.
The problem is successful action will require setting aside pretty much all the culture war issues that are used to divide the working class, and I don't really see that happening. If anything culture-war polarization is getting worse. It will also require some formerly-privileged groups like software engineers to jettison their self-deceptive libertarian delusions, and properly understand their true role in society (software engineers should have unionized pre-2022 when we had more economic power, but economic comfort and those delusions prevented it).
The trouble with unionization is that it doesn't really address supply and demand, just bargaining. There are a dozen un-pulled levers available to bring aggregate labor supply and demand in balance. Overtime law, vacation policy, retirement policy, education funding, tax law (this is a big one -- taxes are obscenely lopsided on the labor/consumption economy vs the capital/investment economy), and so on. We need to pull those levers instead.
Yep, it's going to be a helluva fight.
Sindisil · 2026-10-27 14:45:41 UTC
Why instead?
All those should absolutely be addressed (especially taxes), but organizing labor could be both a powerful way to push for those changes, as well as a force to maintain better labor/capital balance going forward.
10111001 · 2026-10-27 14:48:23 UTC
> The trouble with unionization is that it doesn't really address supply and demand, just bargaining. There are a dozen un-pulled levers available to bring aggregate labor supply and demand in balance. Overtime law, vacation policy, retirement policy, education funding, tax law (this is a big one -- taxes are obscenely lopsided on the labor/consumption economy vs the capital/investment economy), and so on. We need to pull those levers instead.
All those other levers are political policy levers, correct? Besides bargaining, unions can also do political organization and lobbying.
rexpop · 2026-10-27 15:13:25 UTC
Major state interventions that altered labor supply or rebalanced wealth (eg such as standardizing the 8-hour workday, establishing public pensions, or funding universal education) were won through waves of union mobilization and working-class political pressure.
It's not one or the other. Unionization is literally (figuratively) the hand that pulls those levers.
coldtea · 2026-10-27 15:19:17 UTC
The result of unioninzing includes pulling those levels.
rayiner · 2026-10-27 14:00:56 UTC
There is a reason nobody is willing to capitulate on the “culture war” positions they care about to “unify the working class.” People aren’t fungible economic automatons pursing material gain and they don’t believe policy is self-executing. If people have fundamental differences in how they view the world, what they value, what they think “good” is, they’re not going to capitulate on those in support of paper economic policies that may or may not work anyway.
10111001 · 2026-10-27 14:37:01 UTC
> There is a reason nobody is willing to capitulate on the “culture war” positions they care about to “unify the working class.” People aren’t fungible economic automatons pursing material gain and they don’t believe policy is self-executing. If people have fundamental differences in how they view the world, what they value, what they think “good” is, they’re not going to capitulate on those in support of paper economic policies that may or may not work anyway.
I'm not saying capitulate, I'm saying set aside, as in table them to focus on more pressing issues.
Preserving some working class power in the face of the kind of automation being imagined now is going to take a large, unified political coalition that can prioritize effectively. Precisely because "nobody is willing to capitulate" on those issues, make them very useful in fracturing that coalition into non-existence or ineffectiveness.
amanaplanacanal · 2026-10-27 15:44:11 UTC
If the "other side" doesn't put aside the culture war issues too, then "our side" will lose on them.
If you would explicitly state which culture war issues you are talking about, we might be able to have a productive discussion about it. Some issues are less important than others.
rayiner · 2026-10-27 15:51:34 UTC
You can’t “table” cultural issues because people’s view of what’s good and desirable arises out of their culture. That makes it extremely difficult for people with divergent cultural views to cooperate on shared economic goals. Viewing this as some top-down effort to “fracture the coalition” overlooks that the coalition doesn’t exist in the first place. If you look all over the world, people unify over ethnicity, culture, and ideology—usually in that order.
chrisweekly · 2026-10-27 14:12:38 UTC
"formally-privileged" ->
"formerly-privileged"
lkey · 2026-10-27 13:50:37 UTC
> I'm very pro-union BUT
You are 'pro' an abstract, unrealized union, which is not 'pro union' at all.
You have abdicated your obligation to align your actions with your stated beliefs.
Do not give up before trying. Do not believe the hype that your labour power doesn't matter. Even Amazon couldn't stop their most exploited workers from unionizing, is your company bigger that that? Is your position weaker than theirs?
Worse that can happen is that you started talking with your fellow workers and they aren't interested.
Just because SV is run by several millenarian cults doesn't mean you should take their delusions about neo slavery and feudalism (Thiel/Yarvin; your doomerism stems from here) or apotheosis (anthropic, EA) as inevitable. You should assume they believe their own hype, but not assume they understand material reality outside their insular social bubbles.
Thiel's last 3 or 4? attempts at building his techo-utopia collapsed before even starting; They have no motion outside of what they can purchase.
neutronicus · 2026-10-27 14:57:21 UTC
The position is weaker in the sense that an effective SWE union probably has to span national boundaries, and will likely be a short-term loss for SWEs in high-cost geographies.
keybored · 2026-10-27 15:36:48 UTC
> I'm very pro-union but I feel like at this point attempting to organize will just speed up the process of replacing as many people as possible with machines, not slow it down. It's too little, too late.
Ah, the shut up it’s too late gambit.
chasd00 · 2026-10-27 15:51:48 UTC
Software devs have been devastating industry after industry for the 30 or so years I've spent in my career. If you want to see the future for software devs look to the past and see what happened to everyone else ( good and bad ).
I don't think unions are the answer, at least not for knowledge workers. The knowledge of the workers is the bargaining power in that case and AI makes the knowledge worth way less than it was before.
Apparently, minute hands were added to clocks so factory owners could extract more work from their employees.
Medieval people used to own more property (though not technologically equivalent of course) and "owned" more of their time than the average person today.
----
As for the title of this post, I can testify to that: As a solo coder, AI has actually increased the amount of work I do - but in a good way!
Even on non vibe-coded stuff, AI reviews keep helping me finding bugs and inconsistencies to fix that would have taken ages to even notice on my own
but more than that, whenever I have the faintest idea about anything, I can immediately put it to practice and explore it further or move on to other ideas.
Even when I'm outdoors away from my computer doing some normal life stuff in meatspace, I often think of stuff and pull out my phone and open the ChatGPT app to remote into my computer's Codex.
This is actually fun.
pigpop · 2026-10-27 13:57:31 UTC
> Medieval people used to own more property (though not technologically equivalent of course) and "owned" more of their time than the average person today.
That's a pretty serious misconception unless by "medieval people" you mean the nobility. Common peasants had some hereditary title to the land they worked but the land itself was owned by the lord and the king. They were more like hereditary tenants but much worse off contractually than our modern interpretation of a tenant would suggest since they (and their progeny) were often obligated to remain on their land and work it without the option to go elsewhere. They paid their rent in labor and produce or sometimes money if they had any. They had parcels of land that are large by modern standards because they were farmers and they had to sustain themselves on what they grew on their land as well as give a portion of what they produced to the lord that actually owned the land.
They may have "owned" more of their time in that they weren't employed in the modern sense but they still had to put in as much work as it would take to feed themselves and pay their rent. They absolutely had to perform the work their lord demanded of them which might include additional agricultural labor on other plots of land or threshing grain.
It really wasn't a better system. Agricultural labor is gruelling without modern equipment. It's even worse when your life depends on it. Not being allowed to choose where to live or choose your occupation and having that apply to your children and your children's children is worse.
Imagine if you were permanently contracted with your landlord. You could never move to another apartment and your children were obligated to live in the same apartment. On top of that you had to do the maintenance work for the building whenever the landlord asked you to and you still had to pay him rent on top of that. You'd still be slightly better off than a peasant because you wouldn't have to be a subsistence farmer.
teekert · 2026-10-27 13:13:57 UTC
I'm pro unions and come from a social county. I'm self employed though, if I start relaxing, my "competitors" outrun me instantly. Bye bye assignments. This seems like primary school level reasoning to me, I also don't understand the premise of the article.
What stops me from working more than others is being smarter than my competitors right now. Not being smarter in any objective, fixed way. To keep it that way I must constantly evolved, learn.
Yes, micromanaging AIs is more intense for me than coding, and feels more tiring, I hope that (or I) will change, somehow.
bnorton · 2026-10-27 13:27:17 UTC
I started asking for specific example/answers each time a conversation stopped before of the end of the task. I got the sense that frequent checkpointing is baked into Opus 5.5. I then added some language that amounts to “carry this through to completion only stopping if you’re truly blocked” and it really helped lengthen the loop
dotancohen · 2026-10-27 13:18:40 UTC
> There is no reason we aren’t working seven days a week beyond people fighting not to.
Religious edict - most prominently the Sabbath in Western civilization - have mandated a day of rest every seventh day for at least 3000 years.
stuaxo · 2026-10-27 13:36:38 UTC
Sure but proper weekends are much much more recent.
But far away enough that we need to look at this again and get more time back to the workers.
Cyph0n · 2026-10-27 13:37:33 UTC
Did religious edict also eliminate child labor, give us more humane working hours, and establish labor laws? Or was that because of unions?
dotancohen · 2026-10-27 14:19:45 UTC
No.
I answered one incorrect statement. Why try to pile the world on a single statement.
dotancohen · 2026-10-27 14:25:12 UTC
Deuteronomy 24:14-15 says not to oppress a poor hired worker and requires his wages to be paid the same day, before sunset.
BoxOfRain · 2026-10-27 14:43:36 UTC
Both, actually! Nonconformist Christianity was one of several key influences on the labour movement ideologically speaking. At least in the UK the Labour Party is often said to owe more to Methodism than Marx for its original ideological foundations. There's a long history of this, in the aftermath of the English Civil War a group called the Diggers more or less independently invented agrarian socialism out of the New Testament, and a great deal of calls for humane conditions for workers over the centuries were motivated explicitly by Christian teachings. The New Testament is pretty clear in its condemnation of repressing workers, James 5 for example:
> Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth.
This isn't an exclusive or situation, nonconformist religious influence helped create the ideological environment that allowed unions to exist in the first place.
graemep · 2026-10-27 14:45:39 UTC
Religious edict certainly helped a lot.
There were church mandated holidays in the Middle Ages. Lots of them.
The current pope chose his name to signal his continuation of Pope Leo XVIII's teachings on worker's rights, particularly the papal encylical Rerum Novarum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerum_novarum
During the industrial revolution many people treated their workers better because of their religious belief - the Quaker industrialists of Britain are a prominent example.
Just off the top of my head examples.
Cyph0n · 2026-10-27 16:23:18 UTC
Only replying to you since everyone else is making the same points.
I follow a religion with similar edicts (not Christian). I also understand the contributions made by Christianity in this area. But the fact of the matter is that religion was ultimately unable to force actual widespread change on the ground, especially not in secularized European states.
At the end of the day, the only true religion that industrialists and capitalists understand is money. Only unions were able to speak their language at a very large scale, and this is the language they ultimately had to listen to :)
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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)
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.
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!
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.
If the coding was nothing, every good marketing guy could go solo and start large software businesses. It does not happen. You mostly see successful technical founders, or usually a marriage of technical and business cofounders.
Finding a fit between viable business opportunities and the tech to address it is what's hard, and requires several skills: technical, marketing, communication, product design, etc.
There's an alternate employment arrangement...
99.99% of software business is marketing..lol
For example, skills with sales are far more important than actual software engineering.
Just today I was served a clearly AI-generated Halloween ad for Coca-Cola.
All my dev friends swear this is the future, all my scientist coworkers just say it's a useful tool.
I have heard the pitch and have people explained how it works... But I have yet been handed a guide on how to set myself up properly to get the most out of AI. Like I have both a corporate openai gui agent as well as cli setup with a monthly allotment of tokens. But there is no clear standard guide on how I should be setting things up, like we do for python in books "here are the building blocks for python"/aka learn python the hard way
edit: It is actually kinda funny. One would think that if we would embrace the full spectrum now, we could have the best of both worlds ( logic and language side by side solving humanity's problems ).
edit: conditional syntax
frangonf below me brought the receipts too. Unfortunately flagged as [dead]
https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/elon-musk-ai-eventual...
https://www.newsweek.com/ceos-predict-shorter-working-week-1...
https://tech.co/news/ceo-predicts-shorter-workweek-ai#:~:tex...
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-04-05/chatgpt-op...
https://www.businessinsider.com/vinod-khosla-5-year-olds-won...
https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-comments-3-day-wo...
https://www.businessinsider.com/jpmorgan-ceo-jamie-dimon-ai-...
https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-cohen-4-day-workweek-a...
Realistically there were only ever two possible outcomes: you do more work for the same amount of money, or you’re one of the ones who were laid off and your work was transferred to the former.
The only way it will result in less work and the same or better quality of life is if you’re self-employed or are employed by a compassionate human. Sadly that does not apply to the majority of people.
Otherwise most of us would still toil on the fields just to harvest a tiny bit more food than our immediate family needs.
Yes but the number of people who actually worked on the R&D and the amount of time they spent on it is absolutely insignificant on the grand scale of things.
So that means shipping higher quality, faster, with more features, and for a lower end price.
This is the part missing from many of the hot takes about regulating AI: The type of work that AI can do is the most portable globally. You can try to regulate AI or force companies to pay more for AI-assisted labor, but that only works within your borders. A hundred other companies in other countries will be more than happy to come do the work remotely. You can try to regulate that, too, but then the entire products will be built outside of the country.
I don't understand what kind of society we're building right now. Anthropic and other AI labs at $20T valuations, the 1% monopolizing all the wealth and the rest of us out of a job and fighting for the scraps?
There seems to be some sort of magical thinking within the AI crowd at the moment, that it'll all work itself out in the end.
- Build the God Machine
- ??????
- POST-SCARCITY UTOPIA!
Do those calling for unionization forget how the railroads dealt with workers trying to unionize? Ever heard of the Pinkertons.
Large companies have been spending millions in propaganda and attacks to ensure that people in the US think that unions are pure communism. By the time we get enough people to make a difference there may be T100's stepping on our bones at this point.
What a convenient little trap we've set for ourselves. If everyone's money was set to run out at the same time, there'd be problems.
Honestly, I think the only shot workers have is unionization plus really aggressive political action.
The problem is successful action will require setting aside pretty much all the culture war issues that are used to divide the working class, and I don't really see that happening. If anything culture-war polarization is getting worse. It will also require some formerly-privileged groups like software engineers to jettison their self-deceptive libertarian delusions, and properly understand their true role in society (software engineers should have unionized pre-2022 when we had more economic power, but economic comfort and those delusions prevented it).
Edit: fix typo pointed out in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50259693
Yep, it's going to be a helluva fight.
All those should absolutely be addressed (especially taxes), but organizing labor could be both a powerful way to push for those changes, as well as a force to maintain better labor/capital balance going forward.
All those other levers are political policy levers, correct? Besides bargaining, unions can also do political organization and lobbying.
It's not one or the other. Unionization is literally (figuratively) the hand that pulls those levers.
I'm not saying capitulate, I'm saying set aside, as in table them to focus on more pressing issues.
Preserving some working class power in the face of the kind of automation being imagined now is going to take a large, unified political coalition that can prioritize effectively. Precisely because "nobody is willing to capitulate" on those issues, make them very useful in fracturing that coalition into non-existence or ineffectiveness.
If you would explicitly state which culture war issues you are talking about, we might be able to have a productive discussion about it. Some issues are less important than others.
You are 'pro' an abstract, unrealized union, which is not 'pro union' at all.
You have abdicated your obligation to align your actions with your stated beliefs.
Do not give up before trying. Do not believe the hype that your labour power doesn't matter. Even Amazon couldn't stop their most exploited workers from unionizing, is your company bigger that that? Is your position weaker than theirs?
Worse that can happen is that you started talking with your fellow workers and they aren't interested.
Just because SV is run by several millenarian cults doesn't mean you should take their delusions about neo slavery and feudalism (Thiel/Yarvin; your doomerism stems from here) or apotheosis (anthropic, EA) as inevitable. You should assume they believe their own hype, but not assume they understand material reality outside their insular social bubbles.
Thiel's last 3 or 4? attempts at building his techo-utopia collapsed before even starting; They have no motion outside of what they can purchase.
Ah, the shut up it’s too late gambit.
I don't think unions are the answer, at least not for knowledge workers. The knowledge of the workers is the bargaining power in that case and AI makes the knowledge worth way less than it was before.
Apparently, minute hands were added to clocks so factory owners could extract more work from their employees.
Medieval people used to own more property (though not technologically equivalent of course) and "owned" more of their time than the average person today.
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As for the title of this post, I can testify to that: As a solo coder, AI has actually increased the amount of work I do - but in a good way!
Even on non vibe-coded stuff, AI reviews keep helping me finding bugs and inconsistencies to fix that would have taken ages to even notice on my own
but more than that, whenever I have the faintest idea about anything, I can immediately put it to practice and explore it further or move on to other ideas.
Even when I'm outdoors away from my computer doing some normal life stuff in meatspace, I often think of stuff and pull out my phone and open the ChatGPT app to remote into my computer's Codex.
This is actually fun.
That's a pretty serious misconception unless by "medieval people" you mean the nobility. Common peasants had some hereditary title to the land they worked but the land itself was owned by the lord and the king. They were more like hereditary tenants but much worse off contractually than our modern interpretation of a tenant would suggest since they (and their progeny) were often obligated to remain on their land and work it without the option to go elsewhere. They paid their rent in labor and produce or sometimes money if they had any. They had parcels of land that are large by modern standards because they were farmers and they had to sustain themselves on what they grew on their land as well as give a portion of what they produced to the lord that actually owned the land.
They may have "owned" more of their time in that they weren't employed in the modern sense but they still had to put in as much work as it would take to feed themselves and pay their rent. They absolutely had to perform the work their lord demanded of them which might include additional agricultural labor on other plots of land or threshing grain.
It really wasn't a better system. Agricultural labor is gruelling without modern equipment. It's even worse when your life depends on it. Not being allowed to choose where to live or choose your occupation and having that apply to your children and your children's children is worse.
Imagine if you were permanently contracted with your landlord. You could never move to another apartment and your children were obligated to live in the same apartment. On top of that you had to do the maintenance work for the building whenever the landlord asked you to and you still had to pay him rent on top of that. You'd still be slightly better off than a peasant because you wouldn't have to be a subsistence farmer.
What stops me from working more than others is being smarter than my competitors right now. Not being smarter in any objective, fixed way. To keep it that way I must constantly evolved, learn.
Yes, micromanaging AIs is more intense for me than coding, and feels more tiring, I hope that (or I) will change, somehow.
But far away enough that we need to look at this again and get more time back to the workers.
I answered one incorrect statement. Why try to pile the world on a single statement.
> Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth.
This isn't an exclusive or situation, nonconformist religious influence helped create the ideological environment that allowed unions to exist in the first place.
There were church mandated holidays in the Middle Ages. Lots of them.
The current pope chose his name to signal his continuation of Pope Leo XVIII's teachings on worker's rights, particularly the papal encylical Rerum Novarum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerum_novarum
During the industrial revolution many people treated their workers better because of their religious belief - the Quaker industrialists of Britain are a prominent example.
Just off the top of my head examples.
I follow a religion with similar edicts (not Christian). I also understand the contributions made by Christianity in this area. But the fact of the matter is that religion was ultimately unable to force actual widespread change on the ground, especially not in secularized European states.
At the end of the day, the only true religion that industrialists and capitalists understand is money. Only unions were able to speak their language at a very large scale, and this is the language they ultimately had to listen to :)