Hey!

Welcome back to another week of musings.

The last few days of summer, and I see the trees starting to drop their leaves. The change of seasons is always an interesting inflection point of the year.

We're starting to prepare for the Holiday season, with people taking time for friends and family.

I hope you had a great weekend and managed to rest!

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Things I enjoyed in the past week

• Signals & Levers This book has been all over my social media, so I had to buy a copy. Will let you know once I read it.
• TBM 441: AI, the Loss of Positive Friction, and What to Do About It

I've been thinking about if we're in this new age of AI, are we working less or are we working more? I feel both things can be true at the same time. Work historically has always had its ebbs and flows, so there are moments of calm and moments of high intensity, depending on where you work.

Like, if you work at a startup, probably there's always high-intensity work. But the main point I'm trying to make is that I don't think AI is changing efficiency that radically in some of the historical companies that have been slow to adopt AI technologies. Even though companies have early adopters, laggards, whatever, I still feel that the mix of all of that means the average isn't really that fast. I feel some people are working more, and some people aren't really working that much with AI, but there's still more work because there are fewer people due to the layoffs.

And some people are very adamant- I don't know if adamant is the right word, but I feel some people really don't want to adopt AI from the perspective of, "I can do the code better," or, "I still want to do a code review by myself," and things of that nature. I feel that combination makes all of us work, in some sense, more and in some senses less, because there are still things that we are struggling with on how to "delegate to an agent," or we don't know how to transform it into an automated process that an agent can take over from us. There's also the identity crisis of, "If I'm not what I'm supposed to be doing." I feel some roles feel that hit more seriously than others, especially if your company has this idea of hands-on, keyboard-type roles and only that; then it would be harder for a lot of people to separate themselves from code.

But if your company has much more robust or mature, I don't know how to put it, but a larger scale of a larger career ladder where there's principal or seamless engineers where they code on very deep problems that an AI might not be able to take. And you are expected, as you progress through the career ladder, to, in a way, code less, meet more, sync between stakeholders. I feel you kind of mentally prepare yourself in your company that you will be coding less and less, or that you'll be coding things that are harder problems or not-so-well-defined problems that you actually need the curiosity and things that makes us human to solve those problems.

I don't know. I think in general, some people are trying to be very aggressive with their AI usage, and they might end up working more because they're having to set up agents, control them, let them be, making sure that the feedback loop is correct so that the agent doesn't go crazy throughout a lot of PRs. And some other people are not adopting it, so they are working slower, and if they only take what they can work, then they probably just seem that they're working less, but they might be working what a normal human being can do. I think all in all, on average, I think a company is probably doing the same amount of work or even less at this point because a lot of people are struggling to find ways to incorporate AI into their workflows or letting go of the idea of working on a task by themselves.

Your turn!

Do you think we're working more or less in this new age of AI? Let me know your thoughts by replying to this email!

Happy coding!