it's easy to get the feeling that LLM coding agents making software development "free" now because a skilled engineer can do what used to take them two weeks in one intense day and that is a 10x speed up which is amazing but it's not free and they're working even harder than they did before, with zero downtime, and will burn out that much faster.
I saw a psychologist talk about how automating the 'easy tasks' means everyone's jobs will just get harder. Because the human has to do the hard stuff all the time now.
Her example was in call centers, where an agent might take 1 difficult call in 10, which is stressful, but the person has the 9 easy calls to offset that stress and recalibrate their nervous system. But when 'AI agents' take those 9 easy calls, you, the human, are left with 100% difficult calls. What used to be a small, unpleasant portion of your day now becomes your entire day, all day, every day.
And to make things worse, your boss fired all the other humans, so rather than spreading out the bad amongst a team of people who could commiserate and provide support, it's just you, absorbing the stress, alone, forever.
And that's miserable.
yeah that's a weird inversion of what happens in some other fields, most famously when autopilots steadily took away more pilot work in the easy situations, only to dump human pilots into impossible situations when they cut out at the worst possible time.
















