Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

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Sample size of one, so take this for what it is, but I was initially kind of depressed when I started using Codex and Claude Code, because it did kind of feel like I was being automated away.

However, more recently I have been having fun by having three concurrent projects going at once. Instead of having less work to do, I just broadened the scope of what I was going to do.

Suddenly, it became so much more interesting. I have started multiple porting-to-WASM projects, a Jellyfin clone that I am already running on my home server written in Erlang, new themes for my blog, and many other things.

I realized that over the years there has been dozens (hundreds?) of projects that I have wanted to do, but I never really got around to doing them because it was just too much effort and I couldn’t justify the time sink. By having multiple agents working at once, I can work on multiple projects concurrently, and I can focus on the harder (and more fun) parts of programming.

Are you getting paid to do any of these?

Do you feel like porting projects from one language to another is actually that productive?

Like, that's fine if you are having fun, but that has no bearing on this overall discussion about automating all the useful work so that we are no longer needed

I am arguing, and I thought this was obvious but I guess not, that that scope of work in general increases.

My personal projects don’t get paid, no, they’re just for fun, but I feel like my point was missed: instead of “having less to do”, I broadened the scope.

I feel like people are making an incorrect assumption that “labor”, even white collar labor, is a fixed-size problem. I don’t agree with that: there’s never going to be a point where we say “shit, there is literally nothing left to do”.

Is the scope is actually increasing, that would be the question. Are we re-allocating the labor from the work that got easier (let's assume SaaS) and reallocating it to something that needs doing, e.g. cancer research.

To me looks like we aren't and your personal projects don't support the opposite.

Right and that's something I probably shouldn't have left unsaid. Yes, AI can do these relatively simple tasks like porting from one language to another, but you can't prompt it to cure cancer in one window and prompt it to solve climate change in another and watch it go

I wasn’t going to be curing cancer regardless so I am not sure I fully understand your point. Like most people reading this forum I am a relatively normal person who has a comfortable life but will be doomed to obscurity with no notable achievements when I die.

I use Codex for work, and I feel like I accomplish more with it than I would have without it. I juggle a lot more projects concurrently and can broaden the scope of what I am doing.

Now we can argue what I do is “easy”, and you’re probably not wrong, but most white collar work is pretty easy and being able to accomplish more easy tasks is still potential productivity.

For that matter, if I am not distracted with the trivial tasks I can dedicate more of my time working on hard problems, maybe even ones we would call “important”.

The Jevon's paradox of personal projects. Amazing.

Yeah, I always think of it as Gustafson’s Law but Jevon’s is probably more appropriate.

Tangential, but related.

When I first started my career, it was working for a company that used SVN as its version control (Git hadn’t quite won yet). Every Friday, we would do The Merge. We called it that, like a proper noun.

The Merge was almost always a 4-6 hour process because it would be taking every branch of every feature/bug we have worked on, and merged it into trunk. The day would be then spent fixing merge conflicts as they came up. I was the most junior engineer (borderline intern) and so that task generally fell on me.

Eventually, I found git-svn, and it brought a multi-hour task down to like 30 minutes, since the merging was so much quicker.

Fridays were always blocked out for me to do The Merge, but it’s not like when I got it done in 30 minutes they said “oh, umm, there’s nothing else to do, go home and forget being paid for today”. They just found other stuff for me to do and I did that.

There’s always more stuff that can be done. We won’t ever run out of potential shit we can do.

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