Productivity Gains, Human Pains: Life with AI Coworkers
There’s a strange kind of optimism in tech these days: every tool demo promises to save you hours, collapse tedious work into a lunch break, and turn complicated workflows into neat one-click actions. The work becomes cleaner, the milestones get hit faster, and some of the grunt work that used to eat evenings is genuinely gone. AI helps ship better drafts, triage issues faster, and prototype ideas with fewer false starts. It’s a real productivity multiplier — the sort of thing that makes you feel like you’re finally getting paid for the work you were actually hired to do.And yet there’s a lingering shadow under that optimism, a background anxiety that never quite goes away. When a tool can write a spec outline, triage tickets, summarize meetings, and generate code snippets — suddenly the org chart has more bots than birthdays.
The paradox is that the same features that make your job easier are the ones leadership points to when they justify headcount cuts. They celebrate faster delivery, and two months later suddenly someone’s job is gone.Me, Myself and AI-rene
Now, don’t get me wrong — I use AI every day at work, and I’m really into it. It takes away the boring stuff like docs, code translation, and templating so I can actually focus on the interesting bits.That freed-up time buys me extra braincells for thinking, designing, and launching weird experiments at my projects — which is good, because they’re in short supply these days. AI handles the scaffolding; I handle the messy, human-first choices that actually move products forward. Sure, sometimes the suggestions are hilariously literal or oddly confident, but that’s part of the fun — I edit, remix, and steal the good parts, and the cycle keeps getting faster and better.I treat AI like an editor and source of inspiration. It provides fresh phrasing, tightens my drafts, and throws wild ideas I never would have tried. But I never take its output at face value. I pick the clever bits, push back on the bland or biased suggestions, and remix what works.This is the fork in the road. I view AI as a tool; management views it as an employee.The All‑Hands Script: Speed, Profit, and Quiet Shrinkage
All‑hands meetings are my favorite example of this double voice. On stage, the CEO talks about speed: ship more, iterate faster, beat the competitor, scale growth. Finance walks through profit metrics. The language is about empowerment and velocity. The slides show charts that go up and to the right. The room claps. But after the applause there’s a slow leak: the company keeps doing “reorgs,” quietly consolidating teams, shifting responsibilities, and trimming roles that now look redundant.It happens playbook‑style: first the keynote about productivity tools and automation, then headcount freeze, then “strategic realignment,” then the calls that tell people their roles no longer exist. Management frames it as necessary, inevitable, or even a tough love reset for the company’s future. The phrase “increasing shareholder value” translates into fewer people doing more with AI. The irony is brutal — the tools we cheer for at demos often become the instruments of our own demise.Why AI Feels Like Both a Friend and a Threat
AI does things I want it to do. It completes repetitive tasks, surfaces insights from datasets I don’t want to comb myself, and helps me draft higher‑quality work faster. That raises my baseline output and gives me more bandwidth to do creative or ambiguous tasks that still need human judgment. Great. But that also changes what “core work” looks like. Tasks once considered specialized now look automatable; roles get reclassified from strategic to operational. There’s also the psychological cost. Working alongside systems that can eclipse your output makes you constantly audit your own value. You start measuring yourself against truth tables and model outputs. You spend time learning tools and workflows that protect your role rather than simply growing in the craft you love. How to Cast Some Light on the Shadow
Some of this anxiety is structural and out of your hands, but there are concrete moves that reduce risk and increase agency:Prioritize work that requires domain judgment, relationships, or cross-disciplinary synthesis — the kinds of messes models struggle to resolve.Learn the tooling, but don’t be defined by it. Know how to use AI; but know when to push back and where human context matters.Invest in people skills. Teams rarely cut connectors — people who hold knowledge, culture, and cross-team alignment are surprisingly sticky. Networking has and will continue to be one of the strongest tools in your arsenal for job security.
None of those guarantees job safety, but they change your status from “number on paper” to “human.”The Question of Morals
There’s a deeper question that companies rarely answer in clear terms: if automation makes us more profitable with fewer employees, what is the ethical or strategic obligation of leadership toward the workforce that built the company to begin with? Right now, too many orgs default to reflexive layoffs because they can — not because it’s the best long‑term choice for the product, customers, or people. That shortcut costs trust, culture, and institutional memory. It also creates a workforce that is perpetually defensive, hoarding knowledge and avoiding risky projects — which is exactly the opposite of the nimble, innovative culture most companies claim to want.Conclusion — The Questions That Remain
AI is changing how we do work in meaningful, mostly positive ways, but it’s also compressing the margin between being useful and being expendable. The day‑to‑day reality for many of us in tech is a balancing act between leveraging tools to do better work and watching those same tools become a rationale for shrinking teams. You move fast and look great — inconveniently, your AI coworker does too.How do you prepare for AI? How do you keep your job safe? Is it even possible to do so in the long run? These are the daily thoughts of an expendable worker in tech. What are yours — and what would you tell someone who’s thinking about staying in the field versus pivoting out?[Patch Notes - Version 2025.11.04]
- Added: constant anxiety about job security
- Increased throughput of code generation and documentation
- Updated daily workflow and tool library
- Blocker: priority on speed and cost over people
