On AI generated Productivity Guilt

I've been writing code professionally for 25 years. Last year I started a company with two old friends, and we're shipping faster than ever. but somehow the backlog grows faster still.

Software Engineering is a creative job, don’t let anyone tells you otherwise. A lot of it is coding, but you have to get a host of other things right to excel at your job. Today, coding is assisted, models are getting better every day. An engineer is gaining what would be called superpowers in 2021. Things that were done by specialists are available instantly at very low cost and high quality. For eg. engineers can now get professional level help to design basic, good looking user interfaces for almost no cost or time. Over the last 16 months, an engineer is now able to do a lot more, and very fast. This is the age of the 10x engineer.

Needless to say, I have agency on a wide variety of areas, as a founder. Coding is not as big a task any more as it used to be. It is not the bottleneck, thinking is. Even that, to some extent is becoming easier with assistance. AI has permeated through every part of my work and flow. And it is helping me execute things at a much faster pace. I can say, at times, I am able to execute a week’s worth of work in some hours with the help of coding agents and general purpose AI chat apps. But those hours are spread apart. Sometimes, its 8 hours a day. Sometimes its 8 hours a week. That is partly because of being a founder and doing different things. And partly because of who I am outside of work.

And somewhere in all this shipping, something is shifting in how I feel about work. AI use has accentuated both - joy at work, as well as productivity guilt. It is borderline fun building with agents, especially when they work. Like a Genie, you wish and then they get you what you want. Many times a week I feel like a kid in a toy store. Hope this lasts a long time. There’s a whole set of things that I avoided like a plague earlier because they were painfully hard to learn. Regex. CSS. Now, I order and someone does it. Better than the best. That has opened so many doors - including things i have been putting off for more than a decade. So much getting done. But.

I could be doing more.

Productivity guilt. I always felt it, but it is more palpable than ever. Study one night before the exams. Work over a weekend to finish something. That sort of stuff helped me wash off those sins. The cost of not doing anything is generally high anyway. Today, that cost is even higher. Washing off is not easy anymore. At my age, night outs hurt for days. The only way I can compete with young people today is by making smarter informed decisions. And not waste time. The mental accounting for time spent vs not spent doing something is getting very hard to switch off. The anxiety, if not controlled is going to lead to a burn-out.

I could be doing more.