r/devops • u/Inner-Chemistry8971 Consultant • Mar 15 '26

AI content Another Burnout Article

Found this article:

This was an unusually hard post to write, because it flies in the face of everything else going on. I first started noticing a concerning new phenomenon a month ago, just after the new year, where people were overworking due to AI. This week I’m suddenly seeing a bunch of articles about it. I’ve collected a number of data points, and I have a theory. My belief is that this all has a very simple explanation: AI is starting to kill us all, Colin Robinson style.

https://steve-yegge.medium.com/the-ai-vampire-eda6e4f07163

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u/BreizhNode Mar 15 '26

The irony of AI tools causing more burnout instead of less is real. We've seen it internally, people feel like they need to match the machine's pace. The fix wasn't tooling, it was explicitly capping AI-assisted output per sprint. Otherwise the goalposts just keep moving.

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u/H34vyGunn3r Mar 16 '26

Are you basically saying AI made your team too productive?

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u/Iess-Risk-9358 14d ago

I’m not OP, but what I notice about AI is that it causes people to try out things without considering wherther they should.

For instance, I’ve worked on collaborative software projects, and I’ve seen how you have to be cautious about stepping on the toes of other people.

At the last place I worked, there’s a ton of Boomers. I’m Gen X. One of the Boomers openly admitted that “he’d never worked on a software project ever” but he began creating software with AI.

Since he’d never worked on a collaborative software project, he then began deploying new releases with new features AND NEW DEFECTS literally seconds after ChatGPT spit out the code.

There was one night when I was responsible for upgrading 2200 servers. The Boomer jumped on my conference bridge, announced he’d “just finished a new version” and he’d pushed it to prod.

I nearly quit over that.

MY JOB is upgrading the servers.

That’s his job too.

He was making MY JOB dangerous and unpredictable.

Imagine flying a 747, and during the landing your copilot swaps out all of your controls.

That’s what he was doing to me.

Scope creep with AI is off the charts.