by jauntywundrkind | 2026-02-16 20:38:21+00:00
Funemployed right now joyously spending way way more time than 996, pulling the slot machine arm to get tokens, having a ball.

But that's for personal pleasure. This post is receeding from the concerns about "token anxiety," about the addiction to tokens. This post is about work culture & late capitalism anxiety, about possible pressures & systems society might impose.

I reflect a lot on AI doesn't reduce the work, it intensifies it.
https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies...
The spirit of this really nails something core to me. We coders especially get help doing so much of menial now. Which means we spend a lot more time making intense analysis and critiques, are much more doing the hard thought work of 'is what we have here as good as it can be'. Finding new references or patterns to feed back into the AI to steer already working implementations towards better outcomes.

And my heart tells me that corporations & work life as we know it are almost universally just really awful about supporting reflective contemplative work like this. Work wants output. It doesn't want you sit in a hammock and think about it. But increasingly I tell you the key to good successful software is Hammock Driven Development. It's time to use our brains more, in quiet reflection. https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...

996 sounds like garbage on its own, as a system of toil. But I also very much respect an idea of continuous work, one that also intersperses rest throughout the day. Doing some chores or going to the supermarket or playing with the kid can be an incredibly good way to let your preconscious sift through the big gnarly problems about. The response to the intensity of what we have, to me, speaks of a need to spread out the work, to de-concentrate it, to build in more than hammock time. I was on the fence about whether the traditional workday deserved to survive before AI hit, and my feels about it being a gross mismatch have massively intensified since.

As I started my post with, I personally have a much more positive experience, with what yes feels like a token addiction. But it doesn't feel like an anxiety. It feels like the greatest most exciting adventure, far beyond what I had hoped for in life ever. This is wildly fun, going far far further out than I had ever hoped to get to see. I'm not "anxiously" pulling the lever arm on the token machine, I'm just thrilled to get to do it. To have time to reflect and decide, I have 3-8 things going at once (and probably double they back burnered but open, on Niri rows!) to let myself make slower decisions, to analyze, while keeping the things that can safely move forwards moving forwards.

That also seems like something worker exploitative late capitalism is mostly hot garbage at too! Companies really try to reduce in flight activities. Sprint planning is about crafting deliberate work. But our freedom and agency here far outstrips these dusty old practices. It is anxiety inducing to be so powerful so capable & to have a bureaucracy that constraints and confines, that wants only narrow windows of our use.

Also, shame on Tim Kellogg for not God damned linking the actual post he was citing. Garbagefire move. https://writing.nikunjk.com/p/token-anxiety https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47021136