I know some of this may sound a little exaggerated. But it also reflects a lot of how AI has contributed to my own burnout the past year.

Thanks for listening. 14/14

The only real advantage you can see to your new employee is that they're cheap. And you can't help but feel a little frustrated that you're now shouldered with all these expectations, all so those above you can save a few bucks. 13/14

But you can't. You are forced to take classes on how to train your employee better, and that takes up even more of your time. 12/14

But it's hard. It's hard constantly feeling like you need to both do your own job and handhold this employee through doing their job. You often wish you could just do your job the way you used to. 11/14

You start to question yourself. Maybe I am just a stick-in-the-mud Luddite, you wonder. Maybe I just need to commit myself fully to working with this new colleague. 10/14

Meanwhile, your boss doubles down that this employee is the future. They expect 10 times the output from you, and if they don't get it, the blame lies entirely on your back. 9/14

The employee, meanwhile, has no redeeming qualities that a human junior colleague might have. There's no satisfaction through interacting with them on pair calls/work sessions. No friendships made, no interpersonal connection whatsoever. 8/14

Where before your job involved periods of discovery and creativity, now all you do is handhold your new employee and police their work. You don't get to do the things about your job that inspired you, and it drains you out. 7/14

And on top of this, you can still never really trust this employee. You have to carefully review every single thing they output with a fine-tooth comb to ensure they don't go back to their old ways of confidently lying about things that are blatantly false. 6/14

You can store some commonly used information in a database so that the employee can re-access it in the future, and some tasks, the employee does alright, but you still spend the bulk of your time handholding, especially when something new comes along. 5/14

What's more, the employee needs step-by-step handholding through EVERY step of what they do: you need to provide every single document, link, and instruction. So now you're spending all of your time spending this employee how to do something you could finish in 5 minutes. 4/14

So, you tell your boss that the new employee isn't working very well. Your boss tells you that it's your fault the employee is lying, and you need to specifically tell them to be truthful. 3/14

This employee completes tasks phenomenally quickly, but does so by making frequent errors, fabrications, and omissions, all the while passing them off as fact. 2/14

Imagine you come in to work and your boss introduces a new employee, telling you that this employee will make your job 10 times easier. 1/14

Haha well I'm still terrified of the compiler 😂 but I will say that unlike in some languages, Rust's compiler error messages are actually quite helpful.

The path isn't always simple, but there at least usually tends to be a good map.