I really enjoy programming with AI agents. This is the closest I’ve ever come to having magical superpowers. Today’s AI is already smart, capable, resourceful and agentic enough to bring me joy.
This post is about the flip side of that: for most people I know, this fun turns into a death march. We have these powerful tools, but we feel more exhausted and overworked than ever. We ship more, but enjoy it less.
Source: https://frantic.im/bottleneck/
Sure thing you got disappointed - you chose not to train your mind, your confidence, your attitude… to stay self-sufficient and actually treasure achievements to be proud of. No. You chose to outsource, to depend, and to atrophy yourself and your history, where no names exist but tokens.
Congratulations. You damaged your own history.
There’s a thing in our culture where we simultaneously tell people to work hard, and to become the guy at the top who doesn’t work.
CEOs and managers and such often don’t really do much work. They’re not in the weeds making the thing go. They don’t spot that O(n^2) algorithm and fix it so the site doesn’t go down under load. They send a message that says “site seems slow”, and someone actually fixes it.
This is a problem all over. The people we let make decisions aren’t the people doing the work. They don’t know how things work.
AI creates a smaller version of this. It turns you into an idiot leader, but without the benefit of taking all the profits from labor.