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An engineer I know hasn't taken a full weekend off in four months.…

X (Twitter) post

An engineer I know hasn't taken a full weekend off in four months. Not because his company is demanding it. Because he can't justify stopping. That's the thing nobody predicted about AI. The whole narrative going in was simple: AI arrives, automates the tedious stuff, workers get their time back, everybody wins. The beach house fantasy. Shorter hours, same output, better life. It made perfect sense on paper. Except that's not what's actually happening. Take software engineers as the clearest example right now. AI has made them somewhere around 100x more productive. That's not a rounding error. That's a different category of capability entirely. You'd think that means the work gets done faster and people log off early. But the opposite is happening. Engineers are sleeping less. They're working weekends. They can't switch off. Why? Because the opportunity cost of rest just went through the roof. If you can ship in a day what used to take a week, and your peer is doing the same thing, then stopping to relax isn't really rest anymore. It's falling behind. And if you're a type A player, that calculation runs in your head constantly. Why would you coast when you can create something genuinely impressive in the time it used to take just to set up the scaffolding? This is the counter-intuitive part. AI doesn't reduce urgency for high performers. It raises it. The people who thought AI would create mass unemployment or at least a gentle four-day-week for everyone missed something about human nature. Specifically, about the kind of humans who actually drive output in any field. They're not optimizing for leisure. They're optimizing to get ahead, to build things, to see what they're capable of. Give them a faster engine and they don't slow down. They find a bigger road. So instead of the unemployment wave that the doomers predicted, what we're actually heading toward is a productivity explosion alongside a group of people working harder than ever. The shift isn't from employment to no employment. It's from constrained productivity to something much larger, with the people who move quickly to take action capturing almost all of the upside. This pattern isn't going to stay in software. It'll move into marketing, law, finance, design, anywhere that type A people are already pushing hard. The tool changes. The behavior doesn't. The engineers staying up late aren't victims of AI. They're the ones who figured out what it actually means to have a 100x multiplier in their hands. That's not a tragedy. It's just not the story anyone was telling a few years ago.

Mark HadfieldJun 20, 2026Published to X - Mark HadfieldView original ↗

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