Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration

stogot

I could care less about bot sitting (haven’t we always written our own automation?), but it’s botsitting the unverified slop that people send you that fuels frustration. I thought I worked with competent people who respected me

intended

Understanding what is going on with AI productivity is … frustrating to say the least. The best I can say is that genAI is a self reported a 20% efficiency boost, and for a very (very) small group of people, it’s maybe a 2-3x boost. (And if you are at a frontier lab, you go fly into the big bucket of exceptions) At this point, for most use cases, AI productivity is either the equivalent of giving people 3D printers, and seeing little benefit, or signing up for an outsourcing service, just without the development of human capital anywhere.

righthand

“the incredible ground-level utility that many of us on HN celebrate every day through undeniable, massive productivity gains” I’ve been told before.

rocketpastsix

6 hours a week is low, unless its the average spread across industries. I think I spend more time in Claude Code via the CLI versus any other app I have on my laptop. Like others said, the frustration is when it gets something so wrong you just think "wow, how'd you mess that up?" but when it gets it right its kind of nice. I also dont like that I basically tell Claude what to do, and then either go to busy work or waste time on the internet.

Aboutplants

Isn’t this just the new type of work? Human in the loop of automated processes? Welcome to the factory!

kstenerud

I've found that setting good guardrails, and running in a sandbox so that the agent doesn't keep asking tedious permission questions, makes things go a LOT smoother. Generally, I spend anywhere between 15 mins and an hour setting things up (depending on how well the project is set up for AI work), and then set the agent going, coming back in a half-hour to an hour to check its progress. Generally, the tooling keeps it honest (for golang, forbidigo is AWESOME). 80% of the questions the agent asks me require a lot of thought. 20% of what it does needs correction. The other thing to remember with LLMs is that they are NOT human, and won't react in a human way. So you'll see strikes of "brilliance" followed by the absolutely bizarre. But good guardrails keep that to a minimum.

parpfish

i've seen a number of articles claiming things like "devs self report they'er +x% more productive with AI, but actually they're -y% LESS efficient!". and i think that this is explanation for why. as a boss (or researcher) i'm going to measure productivity based on amount of output per hour that i'm paying you; as a workers, i'm going to measure productivity based on amount of output relative to the amount of effort i'm putting in. so what may be happening is that bosses see that output is at 80% (productivity down!) but workers see that they can give that 80% output with 40% effort (productivity up!).

soared

I spend at least 6 hours a week arguing with bots owned by other teams, as I’m unable to reach a human before I bypass their bot. 10k person company, clients are paying for my time.

axus

Bot-sitting is the new long compilation times.

clippy99

Just 6 hours, lol!

btbuildem

My favourite personal experience is how they disabled yolo mode in Claude Code at my workplace

banannaise

This really hit home for me: In some cases, workers are also being asked to automate the parts of their jobs they enjoy most, Hinds said on the podcast, pointing to customer-service employees who enjoy building relationships but are increasingly expected to supervise AI agents instead. "That's what gives you joy and meaning at work," she said. "That is very dangerous." What's a 20% productivity gain if I constantly feel deflated by work that used to energize me? That's going to give back the productivity gain and more, while also decreasing my quality of life.

peter_d_sherman

'Botsitting' -- that word is going into my 2026 lexicon! :-)

jmuguy

I don't see a lot of talk about how AI development breaks the old feedback loop of write code, watch it run, change it, repeat. I really hate sitting around waiting for the agent to get done planning, reading the plan, then waiting for the agent to get done coding. It's those 5-10 minute windows when its working that really sap my patience and suck all the fun out of our jobs. Writing code by hand is just more fun.

paulsutter

It takes years to adapt fully to new tools, and it takes years for the toolmakers to figure out what the tools need to do This is all normal. It’s also well worth the time spent learning

organsnyder

My challenge has been trying to manage my higher-level context. I've gotten a pretty good setup where I have project-level orchestrator agents that can spin up workers to implement tasks with minimal oversight, and the resulting work is usually quite good (especially after I give it the mandatory "make the comments less verbose" refining, etc.). But that means I'm doing even more context-switching. I've gotten to the point where I have a half-dozen draft PRs that just need my review before I tag my colleagues, and trying to dig up the context from all of those tasks can be paralyzing.

giancarlostoro

This kind of reminds me of an article that I saw on HN ages back, there's like a subset of office workers who automated their Excel jobs, and just show up to work, read books, and do literally anything, while Excel does their work for them, and they collect their paycheck.

blakesterz

I just started using Claude Code for my work as a sysadmin. For my work, it's great. I don't need to wrestle with MySQL joins, claude gets even the most complex ones right WAY faster than I would. Same with new Terraform stuff. Things that would have taken me a day are cut to less than an hour. So for my work, it's made me much better at my job. Much faster and more accurate.

xhkkffbf

And if management decides we don't need those 6 hours of human work, will everyone still be complaining?

_pdp_

It is surprising! I would have thought it is at least 6 hours per day.