> The human is left doing whatever the machine can't, often a narrower slice of the original role
I haven't seen anyone talk about AI and its impact on flow yet. It's pretty easy for me to achieve a flow state while coding without AI, but with AI, I'm not so sure. I spend my time managing multiple Claude instances as they work on different tasks, and there's no time to go really deep into anything.
Flow was such a productivity boost for me. Even though Claude definitely helps me finish tasks quicker, I've started wondering how much quicker it actually is, vs getting into flow.
I’ve tried having one “big” task that I’m focusing on with active back and forth while letting other Claude instances handle easier back-burner type tasks that it can effectively one-shot. But I’ve noticed that often turns into me spending more time/focus than I’d want on tasks that aren’t actually that impactful. I still think I get more done than I would otherwise, but I still haven’t found the best management strategy.
I’ve seen people share the same experience here on HN. Im also in the same boat while I find LLMs uncomfortably useful but quite tiring to work with. To maintain flow I spend more time on crafting a complete and clear promot, akin to programming in natural language and avoid the back and forth when possible.
Hardware will continue to improve, and eventually you'll have the choice of reaching a flow state with 2026 models, or using frontier models at our current level of performance.
In a sense, that is almost exactly the vision of the future shown in accellerando. User can and does send tons of specialized agents into the world. I am still not certain if I buy the premise of the article, but then my company is too cheap to let me play with Claude.
> In strong-bundle occupations… AI improves performance inside the job, but does not remove the human from the bundle," the authors argue.
At least in software engineering, AI can't replace the accountability that only humans can provide, but it multiplies the surface area that a human is accountable for, driving up the work demands on worker in one dimension while it lowers the demand for actual coding. On balance, it's more work down with far fewer people.
> It also squares with what we're seeing so far. AI is reshaping jobs, not wiping them out. Tasks move around, productivity may go up, yet employment and hours haven't shifted much – at least yet. In many cases, the bundle is still holding.
AI will supercharge the decades-old trend of productivity growth dramatically outpacing both employment and compensation, as the returns go primarily to the owners of capital.
The result: a lack of job growth while productivity still rises, and also stagnant wages as workers lose the labor market leverage.
How is this different from previous layers of abstraction? React/JS dev don't have to think about memory management or a million other things that C++ application devs did. Instead that cognitive load is unbundled onto the framework maintainers, and frontend devs can be much more productive.
Obviously react/js didn't cause job apocalypse... Quite the opposite. It's just another abstraction layer making it possible to build a full application with less text. Prompts are the same pattern again IMO
I haven't seen anyone talk about AI and its impact on flow yet. It's pretty easy for me to achieve a flow state while coding without AI, but with AI, I'm not so sure. I spend my time managing multiple Claude instances as they work on different tasks, and there's no time to go really deep into anything.
Flow was such a productivity boost for me. Even though Claude definitely helps me finish tasks quicker, I've started wondering how much quicker it actually is, vs getting into flow.
Hardware will continue to improve, and eventually you'll have the choice of reaching a flow state with 2026 models, or using frontier models at our current level of performance.
At least in software engineering, AI can't replace the accountability that only humans can provide, but it multiplies the surface area that a human is accountable for, driving up the work demands on worker in one dimension while it lowers the demand for actual coding. On balance, it's more work down with far fewer people.
> It also squares with what we're seeing so far. AI is reshaping jobs, not wiping them out. Tasks move around, productivity may go up, yet employment and hours haven't shifted much – at least yet. In many cases, the bundle is still holding.
AI will supercharge the decades-old trend of productivity growth dramatically outpacing both employment and compensation, as the returns go primarily to the owners of capital.
The result: a lack of job growth while productivity still rises, and also stagnant wages as workers lose the labor market leverage.
Obviously react/js didn't cause job apocalypse... Quite the opposite. It's just another abstraction layer making it possible to build a full application with less text. Prompts are the same pattern again IMO
We have managers using chatbot to write code instead of engineers themselves.
Company after company using AI for everything over humans.
If you say that AI is not killing job in 2026, you are delusional.