Thoughts on Living and Working Now

I was going to say that we use AI all the time now, but that’s not really true, is it? It’s not like our phones. If you remember back in the 00s, someone pointed out that the Internet was still a place that you would go. Like, you would fire up a computer and log on. It was only when we got smartphones that we arrived in the era of ubiquitous computing, albeit a somewhat less elegant version than I had imagined. Now a similar thing is true with AI. It’s not something most people use constantly, although a few power users are close. You have to fire up the right program and go use AI, whether that program is a chat UI or a coding tool. It’s not as if there’s a constantly available AI layer, ever present and constantly helping.

Now that I think of it, that’s kind of creepy-sounding. There’s a weird quality to AI, in which its downsides are pretty obvious to people right away. Whereas the Internet felt anonymous but, as it turned out, wasn’t, we enter the world of AI already cautious from our experience with social media. I’ve noticed myself carving out AI-free zones. I blog without AI, except as an editor if I have time. I’ve been keeping my todo list on paper with a pen.

At the same time, I constantly ask myself whether I am using AI enough. I don’t tokenmax — I always think I could be more productive, both at work and on personal projects. In my basically greenfield personal projects, my productivity (weird to put it that way) has probably gone up over 100x, partly because I did so little before, but partly because I really am producing, via vibe coding, a multiple of what a productive software engineer could do in 2019.

Steve Yegge says that AI coding has a vampiric quality, in that it sucks away your time and energy. I suspect it’s not AI coding tools themselves that are inherently vampiric. It’s the allure of getting shit done, and a kind of Jevon’s paradox of productivity. Also, computers are easy to get engrossed in. I remember staying up late computing when I was a kid, or as an adult, staying up till 3 am playing a video game, which is why I don’t play video games most of the time. If we can do more faster, we try to do much more, and we end up spending more time on the thing that’s working. Part of the problem is that getting shit done, even if it’s low stakes hobby stuff, is incredibly satisfying.

At work, it’s important to produce things of value to the organization, not just make random stuff, so one is a little constrained. Nevertheless, the feeling of accomplishment pulls me in, and I spend more time working. There’s a little bit of disconnect between the feeling of how much one gets done and what one actually gets done. The value per hour spent working might only be going up a fraction of the perceived total value increase. Like, if you’re working 140% as much time and producing 150% as much value as before, that’s not a huge increase. It’s also not nothing. I’m not one of those who thinks we’re getting less productive because of AI. The increase is quantifiable. I’ll quantify it, as soon as I get my other shit done.