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Comment by rglover | Hacker News Reader

> Technology was supposed to make room for life but instead for more and more people life is slowly being rearranged around AI.

It's been downright spooky to watch people I know personally or been familiar with totally fall down the rabbit hole.

That said, like with everything, it depends on the person. Some people are taking the Jack Nicholson route, others are finally taking time off and enjoying their life (I'm taking off nights and weekends for the first time in a decade, solely because of the speed up of LLMs).

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I'm taking off nights and weekends for the first time in a decade, solely because of the speed up of LLMs

Research has repeatedly shown that people can only be productive a certain number of hours in a week. People who work more then a healthy number of hours are probably doing busywork.

I have always taken off nights and weekends and I have built a lot of things I am proud of. I am also very happy with my career so far.

I'm in my forties now with a teenage kid and I often realize how fast life flies by and we only get one shot at it. So I'm very happy I chose to work part-time some years, so that I could spend the afternoons with our kid.

> (I'm taking off nights and weekends for the first time in a decade, solely because of the speed up of LLMs).

What did the LLM's speed up that was taking that time away from you?

Just the building process. I maintain my own full-stack JS framework and build apps on top of it. LLMs have significantly sped up my ability to take an idea and ship it (I do turn-based work via Cline + Claude).

Case in point: I was able to ship this [1] in one month flat at a quality level that doesn't make me squirm to release. That same product would have easily been 60-90 days (if not longer) purely by hand for me in the past.

[1] https://fortivibe.com

What is "the Jack Nicholson route"? I happened to watch The Departed last night and am genuinely asking, something to do with working a lot?

Just being a maniac about all of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMRmV1Sj6j4

> (I'm taking off nights and weekends for the first time in a decade, solely because of the speed up of LLMs).

Why weren't you taking them off before?

That's how I fed myself for the last 15 years (freelance, products/services, and the occasional contract). For the better part of that I was completely alone so I filled the time by working a lot. There's also the whole never ending anxiety produced by online hustle culture that makes you think you're falling behind (far worse to deal with when you're indie/solo and not working a job).

> Technology was supposed to make room for life but instead for more and more people life is slowly being rearranged around AI.

It's not like we hadn't been warned by decades of sci-fi work, and researchers, and historians, telling us everything that would be wrong with AI

> I'm taking off nights and weekends for the first time in a decade, solely because of the speed up of LLMs

No you're not. You could very likely organize your life to have your nights and weekends without AI. It's just a choice you made not to do it before

I could have, but my lifestyle at the time didn't demand it and I could get away with working long hours, most days of the week. Now I'm married and yeah, AI has basically kept me at my original pace (hand coding) while taking time off. I can't quantify the delta there but my body sure as hell feels the difference.

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