#future shock

Careful, blabbermouth.

epistemic status: processing future-shock

Just had an AI-centric software development job pitched to me as:

it's not about how many hours the human works in the seat. it's about how many hours are spent working on each project. if you had spent two hours tending to a batch job, that's two billable hours. If you spent two hours tending to two simultaneous batch jobs, that's still two billable hours of work per batch job, which means you did four hours of work in two hours. Your goal is 40 hours of work in a week, not 40 hours of butt-in-chair.

Suddenly, the parable of the AI Bro who's talking to Claude while in the coffeeshop makes sense to me now. That AI Bro is being a productive worker while also having a bit of a life at the same time as his work.

If you're working simultaneously on 2 tickets for the whole week, then you might only spend 20 hours "at work" while still doing 40 hours' worth of work. If you do 3 tickets simultaneously, that's 13h20m "at work" with 40 hours' productivity. In some environments, this might be called time-and-attendance fraud. But instead, for this job, it's using AI to further decouple productivity from work-hours — this time, in a way that benefits the developer.

There have been proposals to cut the de facto 40h work-week to 30h or 20h, which have been pushed back on because of lost productivity. Instead, this job would index productivity to a 2026 baseline, and then as long as you're that productive, you've done the work and earned the salary. Imagine how this would apply to a factory: if a car factory produces a 2026 number of cars, but in 2027 does so in half the clock time thanks to automation, then the workers get the same amount of pay for the same amount of production and can go home early.

Kyle & Adam: Showing their PWG future domination by pulling off an Innovative New BuckSpot within 3 Minutes of starting. (They do get Which Buck is Which and Which Goes On Top mixed up but that's very common even for PWG vets.)