Curious whether AI tooling are making engineers more productive with more free time or more productive with even less free time.
Comments
By binsquare 2025-11-178:36 No question. I am far more productive because it lets me get to the answers I need far faster.
I'm more of a iterative solver rather than someone who tries to solve it all into their head the first go. And ai tools are perfect for that kind of approach.
Besides not wanting to give most enjoyable part of the work to LLMs, reviewing LLM-generated code is much more daunting compared to writing the code yourself. So, I only use it for a very narrow and specific 2-3 liners, e.g. some arcane Win32 API calls, where I'd otherwise be browsing some old forums.
By taariqlewis 2025-11-1720:54 This is my reflection as well. I find myself spending MORE time reviewing LLM-generated code and also spending time thinking through LLM generated choices, which, at many times are inefficient or bloated. Keeping the LLM on the right rails takes up more time, even with lengthy agent.md and claude.md files to manage behaviors.
By heftykoo 2025-11-182:44 Work less time on work, work more time on my side project, because it can let me use less time to get job done, so I have more time on my side project.
And AI has expanded my boundaries — for example, I used to know nothing about image processing, but now with AI help, I’ve learned and use the technology and even built an initial product prototype using OpenCV, which helped my side project get off the ground successfully.
