This really resonates with what Iβve been experiencing too. π
AI has absolutely increased my productivity, and I think its basic coding ability is already very strong.
But higher output also creates new kinds of work.
I now spend a significant amount of time reviewing AI-generated changes, and then building workflows to automate parts of that review process itself. πΉ
Thereβs also more time spent on requirements and design, because once implementation becomes faster, I can suddenly handle many more tasks at the same time.
And that creates another problem: context switching.
When weβre juggling more tasks at once, it becomes harder to focus deeply on each one, and I think that can quietly reduce the overall quality of the work.
So for me, the challenge isnβt really
βCan AI produce more?β
It obviously can.
The harder question is
how we manage everything it produces.
If we blindly generate code, tests, documents, and features without understanding why we need them, weβre not necessarily becoming more productive. We may just be creating a new kind of debt: a growing pile of outputs that someone still has to review, understand, maintain, and eventually clean up. πΉ
At the same time, Iβm still very optimistic about AI.
I think the important thing is learning how to work with it well, rather than simply trying to generate as much as possible.
AI can help us build better things much faster, but we still need humans to decide what is worth building, what is actually correct, and what should not be built at all.
For me, that balance is probably the most interesting challenge of the AI era. πΈ
AI testing storyteller. Writing the 36 Stratagems series β ancient Chinese military tactics meet modern AI system meltdowns. 16yr QA β building AI test framework.
Haha this is so spotβon and mirrors exactly what I wrote in the article π
From my QA perspective, my automated test agent happily runs through the night and spits out dozens and dozens of defect reports like thereβs no tomorrow. It makes it look as if productivity has exploded, but the trick is that it hasnβt erased the work. It just shifts it right into my lap.
I end up spending a lot of my time sorting out whatβs real, whatβs just stale PRD noise, and what needs to be tossed out entirely. Even when I build extra workflows to auto filter obvious junk, thereβs still that pile waiting for me every morning. And yeah, with more items to review and validate, I keep jumping between threads, and it gets harder to hold onto that deep focus we all love.
AI can absolutely crank out code, test cases and reports faster than we ever could. It just does not know what is worth caring about. If we let it run wild, we are not really building faster. We sign ourselves up for a never ending cleanup shift, and pile up a shiny new mountain of AI generated debt.
The fun part is this is not about holding AI back. It is about learning to be the captain instead of the full time janitor. The machine does the exploring, and we decide what actually mattersπͺ
"From that perspective, AI isn't necessarily the original cause of the employment pressure. It may be the trigger that makes an existing imbalance more visible" - yep, there have been years of ferocious hiring - companies were scrambling to pick up anyone who could program their way out of a paper bag - there HAD to be a correction to that, and that correction would probably have come without AI, but AI is probably accelerating it ...
"The harder question is what all that extra productivity is actually going to achieve, and who gets to benefit from it" - that's very philosophical! What is the point and the purpose of it all - is 'work' only a means, or is it also a 'goal'? You'd say it's "only a means", but that's probably a simplification - work gives many people a sense of purpose ...
And regarding "who gets to benefit from it" - all of us (well, most of us) hope it's not just the oligarchs and the "Big Tech bros" who will benefit from it - but that's also an issue for the people who govern us to consider ...
The way I see it, this is just the fourth (fifth?) Industrial Revolution, and it will cause big changes in society and in the economy - but, like previous Industrial Revolutions, it does bring productivity gains, and hopefully the benefits will "trickle down" to all of us, not just accumulate at the top ...
AI testing storyteller. Writing the 36 Stratagems series β ancient Chinese military tactics meet modern AI system meltdowns. 16yr QA β building AI test framework.
Your Industrial Revolution comparison also made me think about Marx's Das Kapital, and some ideas from Mao's writings, particularly On Contradiction and On the Ten Major Relationships.
Marx raised an important question about who owns the means of production and who benefits from the productivity created by them. I think that question is becoming relevant again with AI. The models, computing infrastructure, data, and platforms are becoming important means of production. But the people using them don't necessarily own or control them.
Mao's writings offer another angle worth considering: technological and economic changes don't happen in isolation. They create new contradictions with existing social and organizational structures. If productivity changes much faster than the way work, employment, and wealth are organized, those contradictions become harder to ignore.
There's also a practical question here. We shouldn't judge progress only by how much more a company can produce with fewer people. We should also look at what actually changes in people's lives. Do they get more time, better opportunities, and a greater share of the value they help create?
I suppose this brings us back to your point about work and purpose. If AI can reduce the amount of human labor needed, that could be an opportunity to give people more freedom. But whether that opportunity becomes a reality depends on how society chooses to organize and distribute the gains.
Technology can expand what is possible. It doesn't decide who benefits.
And here's a slightly crazy thought to end with: maybe a few years from now, each of us will have a little AI robot companion following us around, helping with everyday tasks. Things could get a lot more sci-fi than we imagine. Hahaha! π€£
Yeah I like your take, I "gemmed" this one, lol ...
"If AI can reduce the amount of human labor needed, that could be an opportunity to give people more freedom" - if the predicted productivity gains materialize then I could just see us moving from our current 5 day work week to a 3 or 4 day work week ...
I mean, that would make all the sense in the world, wouldn't it? Our (great-)grandparents worked 6 days in a week (Saturdays as well), so it's a natural evolution ...
Making this actually happen will need "new" (or stronger) social contracts, because certain people (looking at you, oligarchs and billionaires) might want to push back against this - just employing fewer people, or the same people but working fewer hours BUT for a lower salary, would probably sound attractive to them (more $$$ in their pockets and higher profit margins for their shareholders) ...
Your (or actually Marx's, lol) comment about "who owns the means of production and who benefits from the productivity created by them" is also spot on - I think at this moment a huge unbalance is being created between the oligarchs/billionaires/tech bros, versus the rest of us ...
Maybe we should start running more LLMs ourselves at home, lol? :P
AI testing storyteller. Writing the 36 Stratagems series β ancient Chinese military tactics meet modern AI system meltdowns. 16yr QA β building AI test framework.
Haha, exactly! π€£ Technological progress is supposed to make life easier. Take the agent I trained: once I clock out, it keeps running and carrying on my work at the office. In a way, itβs like having a second me.
Theoretically, I could work roughly three days and still deliver about what I used to get done in five. But in reality, I just end up with even more test projects piled on my plate. We used to hold things back by saying we didnβt have enough hands β well, that excuse doesnβt really work anymore π.
And speaking of running LLMs at homeβ¦ Jensen Huang must be sitting pretty. GPUs stay perpetually short in supply and just keep climbing in price.π
AI testing storyteller. Writing the 36 Stratagems series β ancient Chinese military tactics meet modern AI system meltdowns. 16yr QA β building AI test framework.
Your 36-defect list is where my queue rule earns its keep: an item only leaves the list when its closing is recorded β done, dropped, or deferred, with a date. Quietly vanishing items were how I lost whole threads of work without noticing. The queue is boring now, and boring is the point.
AI testing storyteller. Writing the 36 Stratagems series β ancient Chinese military tactics meet modern AI system meltdowns. 16yr QA β building AI test framework.
That's a good point. Finding a bug is one thing, making sure it doesn't get lost is another.π€£
With AI generating more findings, I can see why your queue rule matters. Every item needs an outcome, even if the outcome is simply deciding not to fix it.
And I like your last sentence. A boring queue is a good queue. π
AI testing storyteller. Writing the 36 Stratagems series β ancient Chinese military tactics meet modern AI system meltdowns. 16yr QA β building AI test framework.
AI testing storyteller. Writing the 36 Stratagems series β ancient Chinese military tactics meet modern AI system meltdowns. 16yr QA β building AI test framework.
Hahaha, thanks! This was pretty spontaneous. That 500-person QA group had been almost silent for months, then suddenly the floodgates opened and everyone started talking about AI. Guess people have been holding it in for a while. π
AI testing storyteller. Writing the 36 Stratagems series β ancient Chinese military tactics meet modern AI system meltdowns. 16yr QA β building AI test framework.
AI testing storyteller. Writing the 36 Stratagems series β ancient Chinese military tactics meet modern AI system meltdowns. 16yr QA β building AI test framework.
AI testing storyteller. Writing the 36 Stratagems series β ancient Chinese military tactics meet modern AI system meltdowns. 16yr QA β building AI test framework.
This really resonates with what Iβve been experiencing too. π
AI has absolutely increased my productivity, and I think its basic coding ability is already very strong.
But higher output also creates new kinds of work.
I now spend a significant amount of time reviewing AI-generated changes, and then building workflows to automate parts of that review process itself. πΉ
Thereβs also more time spent on requirements and design, because once implementation becomes faster, I can suddenly handle many more tasks at the same time.
And that creates another problem: context switching.
When weβre juggling more tasks at once, it becomes harder to focus deeply on each one, and I think that can quietly reduce the overall quality of the work.
So for me, the challenge isnβt really
It obviously can.
The harder question is
If we blindly generate code, tests, documents, and features without understanding why we need them, weβre not necessarily becoming more productive. We may just be creating a new kind of debt: a growing pile of outputs that someone still has to review, understand, maintain, and eventually clean up. πΉ
At the same time, Iβm still very optimistic about AI.
I think the important thing is learning how to work with it well, rather than simply trying to generate as much as possible.
AI can help us build better things much faster, but we still need humans to decide what is worth building, what is actually correct, and what should not be built at all.
For me, that balance is probably the most interesting challenge of the AI era. πΈ
Haha this is so spotβon and mirrors exactly what I wrote in the article π
From my QA perspective, my automated test agent happily runs through the night and spits out dozens and dozens of defect reports like thereβs no tomorrow. It makes it look as if productivity has exploded, but the trick is that it hasnβt erased the work. It just shifts it right into my lap.
I end up spending a lot of my time sorting out whatβs real, whatβs just stale PRD noise, and what needs to be tossed out entirely. Even when I build extra workflows to auto filter obvious junk, thereβs still that pile waiting for me every morning. And yeah, with more items to review and validate, I keep jumping between threads, and it gets harder to hold onto that deep focus we all love.
AI can absolutely crank out code, test cases and reports faster than we ever could. It just does not know what is worth caring about. If we let it run wild, we are not really building faster. We sign ourselves up for a never ending cleanup shift, and pile up a shiny new mountain of AI generated debt.
The fun part is this is not about holding AI back. It is about learning to be the captain instead of the full time janitor. The machine does the exploring, and we decide what actually mattersπͺ
"From that perspective, AI isn't necessarily the original cause of the employment pressure. It may be the trigger that makes an existing imbalance more visible" - yep, there have been years of ferocious hiring - companies were scrambling to pick up anyone who could program their way out of a paper bag - there HAD to be a correction to that, and that correction would probably have come without AI, but AI is probably accelerating it ...
"The harder question is what all that extra productivity is actually going to achieve, and who gets to benefit from it" - that's very philosophical! What is the point and the purpose of it all - is 'work' only a means, or is it also a 'goal'? You'd say it's "only a means", but that's probably a simplification - work gives many people a sense of purpose ...
And regarding "who gets to benefit from it" - all of us (well, most of us) hope it's not just the oligarchs and the "Big Tech bros" who will benefit from it - but that's also an issue for the people who govern us to consider ...
The way I see it, this is just the fourth (fifth?) Industrial Revolution, and it will cause big changes in society and in the economy - but, like previous Industrial Revolutions, it does bring productivity gains, and hopefully the benefits will "trickle down" to all of us, not just accumulate at the top ...
Your Industrial Revolution comparison also made me think about Marx's Das Kapital, and some ideas from Mao's writings, particularly On Contradiction and On the Ten Major Relationships.
Marx raised an important question about who owns the means of production and who benefits from the productivity created by them. I think that question is becoming relevant again with AI. The models, computing infrastructure, data, and platforms are becoming important means of production. But the people using them don't necessarily own or control them.
Mao's writings offer another angle worth considering: technological and economic changes don't happen in isolation. They create new contradictions with existing social and organizational structures. If productivity changes much faster than the way work, employment, and wealth are organized, those contradictions become harder to ignore.
There's also a practical question here. We shouldn't judge progress only by how much more a company can produce with fewer people. We should also look at what actually changes in people's lives. Do they get more time, better opportunities, and a greater share of the value they help create?
I suppose this brings us back to your point about work and purpose. If AI can reduce the amount of human labor needed, that could be an opportunity to give people more freedom. But whether that opportunity becomes a reality depends on how society chooses to organize and distribute the gains.
Technology can expand what is possible. It doesn't decide who benefits.
And here's a slightly crazy thought to end with: maybe a few years from now, each of us will have a little AI robot companion following us around, helping with everyday tasks. Things could get a lot more sci-fi than we imagine. Hahaha! π€£
Yeah I like your take, I "gemmed" this one, lol ...
"If AI can reduce the amount of human labor needed, that could be an opportunity to give people more freedom" - if the predicted productivity gains materialize then I could just see us moving from our current 5 day work week to a 3 or 4 day work week ...
I mean, that would make all the sense in the world, wouldn't it? Our (great-)grandparents worked 6 days in a week (Saturdays as well), so it's a natural evolution ...
Making this actually happen will need "new" (or stronger) social contracts, because certain people (looking at you, oligarchs and billionaires) might want to push back against this - just employing fewer people, or the same people but working fewer hours BUT for a lower salary, would probably sound attractive to them (more $$$ in their pockets and higher profit margins for their shareholders) ...
Your (or actually Marx's, lol) comment about "who owns the means of production and who benefits from the productivity created by them" is also spot on - I think at this moment a huge unbalance is being created between the oligarchs/billionaires/tech bros, versus the rest of us ...
Maybe we should start running more LLMs ourselves at home, lol? :P
Haha, exactly! π€£ Technological progress is supposed to make life easier. Take the agent I trained: once I clock out, it keeps running and carrying on my work at the office. In a way, itβs like having a second me.
Theoretically, I could work roughly three days and still deliver about what I used to get done in five. But in reality, I just end up with even more test projects piled on my plate. We used to hold things back by saying we didnβt have enough hands β well, that excuse doesnβt really work anymore π.
And speaking of running LLMs at homeβ¦ Jensen Huang must be sitting pretty. GPUs stay perpetually short in supply and just keep climbing in price.π
Jensen Huang made a "whoopsie" ;-) and will have some questions to answer, but I have the feeling he'll be okay :-)
Probably just something to shift everyoneβs attention away π
Your 36-defect list is where my queue rule earns its keep: an item only leaves the list when its closing is recorded β done, dropped, or deferred, with a date. Quietly vanishing items were how I lost whole threads of work without noticing. The queue is boring now, and boring is the point.
That's a good point. Finding a bug is one thing, making sure it doesn't get lost is another.π€£
With AI generating more findings, I can see why your queue rule matters. Every item needs an outcome, even if the outcome is simply deciding not to fix it.
And I like your last sentence. A boring queue is a good queue. π
competitor?π
NICE WRITEUP bro really..
π€£π€£π€£
Great post again, Lingfeng! πππ
Hahaha, thanks! This was pretty spontaneous. That 500-person QA group had been almost silent for months, then suddenly the floodgates opened and everyone started talking about AI. Guess people have been holding it in for a while. π
Top 7 π
ππ€£π€£Luckly,εεε
εε you deserve it! Congrats π
Haha thank you! π Itβs nice to see this piece resonating with people.
But your badge???
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