Some software engineers are finding that AI is speeding up their work, but it’s coming at a cost: It’s also pushing them toward burnout.
Siddhant Khare is one of those programmers. in one interview with business insiderHe lamented that while AI has made him more productive, it has also made him feel that his work has become more difficult than before.
“We used to call it an engineer, now it’s like a critic,” Khare said. BI. “Every time it feels like you’re a judge in an assembly line and that assembly line never ends, you just keep stamping those (pull requests).”
He argued that AI creates a productivity “paradox” by reducing the cost of production, but increasing the cost of “coordination, review, and decision making”, which falls on humans to solve.
“I shipped more code last quarter than any quarter in my career,” he said. wrote in an essaytitled “AI fatigue is real”, posted on his blog. “I felt more tired than any quarter in my career.”
Khare’s description echoes the findings of a Recent study reports Harvard Business Review. After closely monitoring two hundred employees at an American tech company, researchers observed that AI was actually speeding up work rather than reducing workload. Creating a vicious cycle, the researchers wrote, AI “accelerated some tasks, leading to higher expectations of speed; higher speeds made workers more dependent on AI.” “Increasing dependency increased the scope of workers’ effort, and the broader scope further increased the volume and density of work.”
Adoption of AI in the company was voluntary, and the initial enthusiasm for experimenting with AI tools helped increase productivity. But this led to a nefarious “overload”, in which employees, without realizing it, took on more work than was possible for them. Multitasking has also become more common, with some employees finding that they are no longer able to focus on one task, and instead are constantly switching their attention, leading to the feeling that they are “always working.”
Khare described something similar. Before AI, he wrote in his essay, he could spend “a whole day” in “deep meditation” on a problem.
“Now? I can touch six different problems in a day,” he wrote. “Each one ‘only takes an hour with AI.’ But context-switching between six problems is extremely costly for the human brain. AI doesn’t get tired amid problems. I do.”
Khare also blames AI for why his coding skills are weakening.
“It’s like GPS and navigation. Before GPS, you made mental maps. You knew your city. You could reason about routes,” Khare wrote in his blog post. “After years of GPS, you can’t navigate without it. Skills fade because you stop using it.”
He said, Khare is not anti-AI. He believes he can find a way to continue using it in a healthy way, which can be interpreted as an addict’s cliché in a different context. He has experimented with several methods to keep his AI habits under control and recommends a few for his readers as well. But he argues that some responsibility also falls on AI companies.
“You have to have some kind of guardrails for humans so they don’t destroy themselves,” Khare said. BI.
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