Developers Are Working More, Not Less, and They Know It

What makes the current developer moment different from prior waves of tooling anxiety is that the skeptics are not disputing whether AI coding tools work — they are disputing who benefits when they do. The pattern documented in developer communities is consistent: management cites efficiency gains to justify higher output expectations rather than lighter workloads. The developer who ships faster is rewarded with more tickets, not fewer hours. That structural dynamic — not hallucinated code or unreliable autocomplete — is what is shaping how practitioners actually talk about these tools…