The AI Vampire

AI does make individual developers something like 10x more productive once they get fluent — and that productivity is quietly draining the humans who use it, Colin Robinson style. The body works the value-capture question with a two-scenario thought experiment. In Scenario A you do eight hours a day at 10x and your employer captures 100% of the upside; you get burnout. In Scenario B you work one hour, keep the productivity gain for yourself, and your company is out of business inside a year. The right answer has to be in the middle, and Steve's proposed lever is the same one he chalked on a whiteboard at Amazon in 2001 — $/hr — with the observation that employees individually have no power over the numerator but collectively have all the power over the denominator. The new workday, he argues, should be three to four hours. Touch grass. Close the computer.

The same cost/value dynamics decide why some companies turn token spend into compounding leverage while others turn it into a slow drain. It reads as the cost-side companion to Welcome to Gas Town's productivity argument and the burnout-side companion to Software Survival 3.0.