I read this question today, which triggered me a little. In the context of software engineering, many of us have always had pet projects, side projects, or just whacky things we’d like to spend some time coding. Because mostly it’s kinda fun to learn new things, to play, or just practice our love of coding, trying, failing, trying again, failing in different ways.

This was something that was typically invisible to the wider world. I was ok being labelled a nerd working on some project that probably had no real world application, but let me play with a new API or tech that became available. If anything this felt somehow exclusive.

Colleagues who would have normally gone home and spent time with their families are now vibe-coding apps in alarming numbers, normalising a policy of overworking. By no means am I trying to gate-keep this tech, nor am I discouraging people who want to do this, but it’s part of a larger problem, where overworking has been the commonplace.

When I want to work on my project over the weekend, it’s because I want to, not because there’s some sort of expectation for me to be productive for every waking minute.

The egregious irony of all this, is that AI powered coding was sold to us on the promise of becoming more efficient, producing more, obtaining that elusive x10 engineer badge that somehow became a trope. For all the wins, and efficiency that AI has promised, I see people working 10x longer to produce less, with even less quality.

The dangerous part of this is that as practice becomes more common, it becomes an expectation, companies will start to expect their employees to work over the weekends, work evenings, taking even more of our personal lives away from us, to produce what? A half assed app that can just about pretend to be real, and whose author doesn’t understand how it works, that no engineer would dare touch.

What will I be building this weekend?

Maybe a relationship with my friends or family, or maybe even I’ll just go swim in the lake, instead of it having been used to cool a data center.

(This article was written by a human and it pains me that I have to declare that.)