AI tools like Claude Opus 4.6 make engineers 10x more productive and are addictive, but also drain developers' energy, causing increasingly widespread burnout
This was an unusually hard post to write, because it flies in the face of everything else going on.
Steve Yegge
Related Coverage
- This blog post has been baking for a couple of weeks. I paced myself. — The TL;DR is that with AI, I think we're headed for a 4-hour workday or bust. … Steve Yegge
- If AI is making us 10x more productive... why are we working more? — Steve Yegge raised this recently, and it's a fair challenge. … Lars Tackmann
- The AI Vampire Hacker News
- The AI Vampire Lobsters
- AI Is a Burnout Machine Futurism · Frank Landymore
- I love the term that Steve Yegge uses to describe the sense of burnout and mental exhaustion that people overusing AI in their jobs now feel; it's the AI Vampire. — His value capture analogy is a bit nonsensical so just ignore that bit. — https://steve-yegge.medium.com/ ... @carnage4life@mas.to · Dare Obasanjo
Discussion
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@solarise_webdev
Robin
on x
Good article. I'm now actively blocking anyone I see coming out with AI doom fuel, saying “you've only got a year left”, “SWE is finished”, “welcome to the underclass” etc Who talks like that? What place does that pessimism have in a healthy world?
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@badlogicgames
Mario Zechner
on x
recommended reading https://steve-yegge.medium.com/ ...
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@sockdrawermoney
@sockdrawermoney
on x
A++++ conclusion @Steve_Yegge 1-3 hour workday probably needs to be the norm for most knowledge work jobs in order to simply make decisions at a wise pace. Decision fatigue is real. When you're making 10x or 100x as many decisions a day, you are going to make dumber, riskier,
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@championswimmer
Arnav Gupta
on x
So Steve Yegge has speedrun the curve as an engineer to reach the point where Michael Bury the economist already had arrived 2 months back. If everyone makes an escalator, then no one gets a competitive advantage, but you can't sit out and not build it either. [image]
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@hunterwalk.com
@hunterwalk.com
on bluesky
“With a 10x boost, if you give an engineer Claude Code, then once they're fluent, their work stream will produce nine additional engineers' worth of value. — For someone. — But who actually gets to keep that value? The AI Vampire — steve-yegge.medium.com/the-ai- vampi...
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@swallez.com
Sylvain Wallez
on bluesky
Looks that the time of “agentic burnout” realization has come. Another must read. “It would seem that we are addicted to a new drug, and we don't understand all of its effects yet. But one of them is massive fatigue, every day.” steve-yegge.medium.com/the-ai- vampi...