[HN Gopher] AI Isn't Lightening Workloads. It's Making Them More...
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       AI Isn't Lightening Workloads. It's Making Them More Intense
        
       Author : paulpauper
       Score  : 20 points
       Date   : 2026-03-29 19:44 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
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       | thfuran wrote:
       | There's no way under our current economic system that the result
       | of a tool that makes some work easier/faster would be anything
       | other than filling the gap with more or other work.
        
       | simianwords wrote:
       | > In fact, AI is increasing the speed, density and complexity of
       | work rather than reducing it, according to an analysis of 164,000
       | workers' digital work activity.
       | 
       | Isn't this obvious? This is exactly what I would expect!
        
         | bluefirebrand wrote:
         | Yup. And because the "speed, density, complexity" is
         | increasing, expect burnout to increase too!
        
       | QuadrupleA wrote:
       | One thing I haven't seen mentioned much, in AI coding and other
       | AI-assisted work, is the sheer needless verbosity of models, the
       | walls of text they spew out for us to read through. This alone
       | adds to the workload & fatigue.
       | 
       | There's a thing in writing, "pity the reader" - respect your
       | audience's time, get to the point. In The Elements of Style,
       | "omit needless words."
       | 
       | You can prompt models to be succinct, but the latest ones - GPT
       | 5-series especially - ignore your requests and spew paragraphs
       | upon paragraphs of noise. Maybe it's the incentives of charging
       | per token?
       | 
       | If you want, I can expand on this topic and generate a lengthy
       | comparison chart.
        
         | dag100 wrote:
         | This is basically a violation of the robustness principle ("be
         | liberal in what you accept, be conservative in what you
         | produce"), but I doubt there will be much improvement on this
         | front seeing as tokens are fed back into the model. A succinct
         | phrase is a compressed form of a longer sentence that expresses
         | the same idea, so from the perspective of having to feed the
         | model's output back into it, more tokens presumably work better
         | by providing a greater of surface area for processing, so to
         | speak. This is just my intuition, however.
        
       | cyberclimb wrote:
       | https://archive.is/Hsm9U
        
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       (page generated 2026-03-29 23:01 UTC)