The copy though: "Spend your time doing what you want to do!" followed by images of play video games (I presume), ride a bicycle, read a book, and play table tennis.
I am cool with all of that but it feels like they're suggesting that coding is a chore to be avoided, rather than a creative and enjoyable activity.
So absurd. As if your boss is going to let you go play tennis during the day because Jules is doing your work.
If all of these tools really do make people 20-100% more productive like they say (I doubt it) the value is going to accrue to ownership, not to labor.
Shhhh... don't tell the plebes what it really means to "2x their productivity".
Seriously though, this kind of tech-assisted work output improvement has happened many times in the past, and by now we should all have been working 4-hour weeks, but we all know how it has actually worked out.
Hell, when the industorial revolution happened, working hours increased, not decrease. And especially with electricity, Factory owners forced workers to work deep into the night. A constant 16-hour shift was the norm, so much that it requires legal intervention [1]
> In 1833, the Factory Act banned children under 9 from working in the textile industry, and the working hours of 10-13 year olds was limited to 48 hours a week, while 14-18 year olds were limited to 69 hours a week, and 12 hours a day. Government factory inspectors were appointed to enforce the law.
Constant work day in and out, morning and night. At least before the industrial revolution farmers only had to work as long as there was daylight, and winters meant shorter work times.
This video [2] from Historia Civilis is very relevant. The gist of ot is that to this day, we work more hours than medieval peasants did.
not sure if you will still see this 7 days later, but the claim "we work more hours than medieval peasants did" jumped out at me so i looked into a bit and am curious if you have more thoughts on it!
my brief takeaway was that the claim might be true if "work" means "working for an employer for wages", but not if "work" includes "necessary labor for shelter, food, clothing, survival".
but it's an interesting thought though so i'm curious if you have other related resources to dig into.
As a business owner, why would give up some of the profits? You started a business to make money not to do charity. Expecting businesses to act against their interests make no sense
Blame the system, not the actors. See a recent HN submission, The Evolution of Trust by Nicky Case: https://ncase.me/trust/
If there's one big takeaway
from all of game theory, it's this:
What the game is, defines what the players do.
Our problem today isn't just that people are losing trust,
it's that our environment acts against the evolution of trust.
That may seem cynical or naive -- that we're "merely" products of our
environment -- but as game theory reminds us, we are each others
environment. In the short run, the game defines the players. But in
the long run, it's us players who define the game.
So, do what you can do, to create the conditions necessary to evolve trust.
Build relationships. Find win-wins. Communicate clearly. Maybe then, we can
stop firing at each other, get out of our own trenches, cross No Man's Land
to come together...
My take: don't blame corporations when they act rationally. (Who designed the conditions under which they act?) Don't blame people for being angry or scared when they feel unsettled. A wide range of behaviors are to be expected. If I am surprised about the world, that is probably because I don't understand it well enough. "Blame" is a waste of time here. Instead, we have to define what kind of society we want, predict likely responses, and build systems to manage them.
Was he blaming anyone? He just pointed out the mirror of what you did: as the owning class acts one way, it will naturally produce material conditions that incentivize the working class to act in a way that would lead to the destruction/dispossession of the existing owning class (i.e. a revolution).
Maybe the author was -- or maybe not -- but for a large number of people there is an implication that one could "blame" corporations for being selfish, self-serving, criminal, clueless, self-destructive, leading to social ills, and so on. But who established the rules for the corporations? It depends how you ask: previous people, previous systems, the progression of history.
My claim, put another way, is that if you trace the causality back a few steps, you land at the level of the system.
Anyhow, the question "who do we blame?" can be a waste of time if we use it only for moral outrage and/or a conversation stopper. Some think "what caused this?" is an improvement, and I agree, but it isn't nearly good enough.* Still, it isn't nearly as important as "how do we change this with the levers we have _now_?"
* Relatively few scientists understand causality well, thinking the randomized controlled trial is the only way to show causality! The methods of causality have developed tremendously in the last twenty years, but most scientific fields are rather clueless about them.
> we have to define what kind of society we want, predict likely responses, and build systems to manage them.
Nailed it. At the end of the day, companies are automatons. It is up to use to update the reward and punishment functions to get the behaviour we desire. Behaviourism 101
What a clever way to resolve responsibility. Companies are made of people who strategize to rewrite the rules in their favor. They’re not “automatons.”
You talk as though a company exists in its own right independent of the humans. This is a fictional way of thinking. This attitude of "if you want me to stop acting poorly, make me" is an abdication of all responsibility.
It's the idea that individuals and institutions must somehow fix society from the top down or the outside in, which history has shown doesn't work. No one is going to come along and make you be sensitive or intelligent, either you see the predicament we're all in and act, or you rationalize your selfish actions and make them someone else's problem.
> You talk as though a company exists in its own right independent of the humans.
I didn’t say that, nor do I mean that.
My point is this: don’t be surprised when people or organizations act rationally according to the situations they find themselves in.
Go ahead and blame people and see if that solves anything! What is your theory for change? Mine is about probabilistic realism.
Ethics matters, of course. We can dislike how some (one/org) acts — and then what do we do? Hoping they act better is not a good plan.
I see it over and over — people label something as unethical and say e.g. “they shouldn’t do that” and that’s the end of the conversation. That is not a plan. Shame and guilt can have an effect on people, but often only has a small effect on organizations.
Here’s a start: look at the long-term stock exchange (Eric Ries) and see how it’s doing in trying to align corporate behavior with what meshes better with what people want.
I didn't say that, and I think you know I didn't say that. Want to engage on this in way that is more than trading one-liners?
On a human level, people are held to a set of laws and exist in a world of social norms. "Following orders" is of course not the most important goal in most contexts; it is not the way most people think of their own ethics (hopefully) nor the way society wants people to behave. Even in military contexts, there is often the notion of a "lawful order".
When it comes to public for-profit companies, they are expected to generate a profit for their shareholders and abide by various laws, including their own charters. To demand or expect them to do more than this is foolish. Social pressure can help but is unreliable and changes over time. To expect that a few humans will step up to be heros exactly when we need them and "save the day" from a broken system is wishful thinking. We have to do better than this. Blaming something that is the statistical norm is scapegoating. In many/most situations, the problem is the system, not the actors.
That's a nuance worth exploring. The world is being optimized for clockwatchers who want to do their work with the least amount of effort. Before long (if not already) people who enjoy their craft, and think of their work as a craft, will be ridiculed for wanting to do it themselves.
>The world is being optimized for clockwatchers who want to do their work with the least amount of effort. Before long (if not already) people who enjoy their craft, and think of their work as a craft, will be ridiculed for wanting to do it themselves.
There is one clock you should be watching regardless, which is the clock of your life. Your code will not come see you in the hospital, or cheer you up when you're having a rough day. You wont be sitting around at 70 wishing you had spent more 3am nights debugging something. When your back gives out from 18hrs a day of grinding at a desk to get something out, and you can barely walk from the sciatica, you wont be thinking about that great new feature you shipped. There are far more important things in life once you come to terms with that, and you will learn that the whole point of the former is enabling the latter.
Writing code _has_ helped me feel better on some bad days. Even looking back at old projects brings me contentment and reassurance sometimes. On its own, it can't provide the happiness that a balanced life can, but craft and achievement are definitely pleasing. I would consider it an essential part of a good life, regardless of what the actual activity is.
This is different from meaningless work that brings you nothing except a paycheck, which I agree is important to minimize or eliminate. We should apply machines to this kind of work as much as we can, except in cases where the work itself doesn't need to exist.
You could say the same about every job, so you are really arguing against jobs in general. Who's going to help you fix your sciatica if your doctor and physical therapist think like that?
The opposite of a clockwatcher isn't a workaholic, it's someone enjoying writing code and the collaboration, problem solving and design process which leads to what you end up writing, and enjoying _doing it well_ inside normal work hours, remarking at how quickly the clock is going when they do check it.
Yea, as a hobbyist, I like to program. This sales pitch is like trying to sell me a robot that goes bicycle riding for me. Wait a minute... I like to ride my bicycle!
I'm the same way, but there is often monotonous work that stands in the way of me doing the more interesting work. I'm happy to offload that. Even if the AI does a bad job, it makes it easier for me to even start on boring work, and starting is 90% of the battle.
What if it starts by handling the boring tasks but ends up taking over the work you actually enjoy?
The "let AI do the boring bits" pitch sounds appealing—because it's easier to accept. But let's be real: the goal isn't just the dull stuff. It's everything.
It's surprising how many still think AI is harmless. Sigh...
I think they are suggesting that you can focus on the code that you want to write - whatever that is. Especially since the first line is, "Jules does coding tasks you don't want to do." I took the first image as being someone working on the computer. Or, take back your time doing whatever you want - e.g. cycling, table tennis, etc.
All of the work that currently gets pushed back with 'no capacity maybe in Q+2' will become viable and any brief moment of spare capacity will immediately be filled.
A new backlog will start to fill up and the cycle repeats.
Maybe, though, the backlog of the future will actually be less important than the backlog of today? Bug fixes will go out, software quality will increase?
> Or, take back your time doing whatever you want - e.g. cycling, table tennis, etc.
That might be true for hobbyists or side projects, but employees definitely won't get to work less (or earn more). All the financial value of increased productiveness goes to the companies. That's the nature of capitalism.
I don't think it's meant to be literal, more tongue-in-cheek. Obviously, developers aren't going to be playing table tennis while they wait for their task to finish. Since it's async, you can do other things. For most developers, that's just going to mean another task.
I find the enjoyment is correlated with my ability to maintain forward momentum.
If you work at a company where there's a byzantine process to do anything, this pitch might speak to you. Especially if leadership is hungry for AI but has little appetite for more meaningful changes.
> it feels like they're suggesting that coding is a chore to be avoided, rather than a creative and enjoyable activity
I occasionally code for fun, but usually I don’t. I treat programming as a last-resort tool, something I use only when it’s the best way to achieve my goal. If I can achieve some thing without coding or with coding, I usually opt for the first unless the tradeoffs are really shit.
Speaking as someone who codes professionally, it's too hot outside so I wouldn't mind coding instead as long as I get to choose what I code and when. Which I don't most of the time.
Also implying I wouldn't want to fix bugs or colleague's code, those are the things I love most about being a developer. Also I don't mind version bumping at all and the only reason why I "don't like" writing tests is that writing "good" tests is the hardest thing for me in development (knowing what to test for and why, knowing what to mock and when, the constant feeling that I'm forgetting an edge case...) and AI still sucks at these parts of writing tests and probably will for a while...
yesterday I had Jules write tests, and other improvements twice. The tests were pretty good, and of course Jules built the modified code in a VPS and ran it.
I am cool with all of that but it feels like they're suggesting that coding is a chore to be avoided, rather than a creative and enjoyable activity.