Appearing productive at work

Thu, 28 May 2026 16:49:28 +0100

A rather forceful description of the current experience of using GenAI at work. Prisoners are not taken.

There’s a lot that resonates with my narrow area of interest: the continuing necessity for human-in-the-loop (despite much pressure for that to be eliminated); senior-versus-junior productivity dichotomies; and the idea that “accomplishing the work itself used to teach the judgment” now going away means that there is no clear way to acquire judgement when you don’t have the feedback loop to acquire it. Which, I suppose, increases the pressure to remove the humans and use LLM judgement instead.

It’s hard to reconcile in the one model of the world both this piece and the like of the pieces that I scroll past every day, which are insanely enthused about the sheer possibilities of the tools and the huge rate at which they’re improving. Erdős problems, passable literary works, code (of course). And yet I don’t feel that either of those kinds of experience are wrong, or lies.

Work on Non-Functional Blog

Appearing productive at work