Developers are cashing in on the productivity gains. Meaning instead of using the increased productivity to do more work, they just become lazier or do fun irrelevant side projects instead, where as before there was just not much time for such things. I have definitely procrastinated on work simply because I know I can swoop in with an LLM and do it all in 15 minutes, whereas before I would have spent a few hours.
This is how LLMs can both result in greater productivity yet still not appear to yield much more benefit than the pre-LLM era.
And there is no benefit to the developer for doing the work first then just sitting idle. That’s how you get people putting more things on your plate.
Some unsolicited, probably obvious advice for you for the future: never do that again.
Managers will abuse you if you expand your workday to make sure deadlines don't slip. They will see that the work is getting done and see no urgency to hire more help.
You have to surface capacity issues to management, learn to say "no" diplomatically, and/or "I have capacity for 2 things out of these 5, prioritize which ones you want first."
The LLMs are better at enforcing their boundaries than developers. Run out of tokens? That's it. No more code. It doesn't care how much the company needs this for the customer call tomorrow.
Odd, it was the opposite for me. Last year, no burnout. But then agents got good and everyone wanted more code more features faster and faster. I got burnt to a crisp. Now? I don’t give a fuck. Ok people want to push tons of code straight to prod? Go ahead, looks good to me… no need to review it if it’s with the latest frontier models right?
Exactly, I finally migrated that old service to typescript and cleaned up some really annoying tooling, for example. I’m more productive and can get quick fixes out very quickly. We’re also seeing agents help identify incidents faster than human investigation can. But big structural things that are hard to integrate still take lots of time.
This is how LLMs can both result in greater productivity yet still not appear to yield much more benefit than the pre-LLM era.
And there is no benefit to the developer for doing the work first then just sitting idle. That’s how you get people putting more things on your plate.