Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by hatthew 31 days ago
In no particular order

    - Meetings
    - Reading papers
    - Understanding legacy code
    - Reading internal news
    - Ad hoc chats with coworkers
    - Writing docs
    - Editing configs
    - Thinking about solutions
    - Slacking off
    - Analyzing results
    - Testing code
    - Reviewing PRs
    - Understanding others' ongoing projects
2 comments
throwaway2037 30 days ago 

    > Slacking off
I laughed when I read this, but there is something to it. I like to say "intellectual relaxation" or take a break. Sometimes getting up from your desk to do some mindless admin task like photocopy a document for HR can free up your mind. If we were line workers at a factory, this would be mandated breaks. Business/Financial newspapers and factory executives love the old quote: "With robots, they never need a break, never need holiday, and can work 24x7." With the advent of agentic LLMs, a tiny fraction of that reality is leaking into the white collar world.
link
PizzaBorsch 31 days ago
AI can do everything you listed except chats with coworkers and slacking off.

I just don't think you've utilized the most recent versions of codex or claude.

link
hatthew 31 days ago
It's definitely theoretically possible, but not there yet. I use cursor, claude (opus 4.7), and several proprietary LLMs/LLM frameworks at my job. The institutional knowledge I have wouldn't fit in the context window, and AIs lack my mental index/intuition of where to look for answers. When my AI makes a PR, I generally have to make some important changes, without which it's solution would be fundamentally broken. AI also cannot be trusted to make the right business tradeoff decisions.
link
Shocka1 30 days ago
Many things at my software engineering job are like this, which require constantly changing human institutional knowledge that is almost always undocumented, or changing so quickly that it isn't relevant anymore. By the time you decide to automate it, the process changes. Tribal knowledge used to be something I hated seeing senior engineers keeping to themselves, but now it seems like an asset.
link