Tootfinder

A software engineer explains AI fatigue, compounded by a FOMO treadmill of using labs' latest tools, thinking atrophy, and more, alongside boosted productivity (Siddhant Khare)
https://siddhantkhare.com/writing/ai-fatigue-is-real

AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it | Siddhant Khare
You're using AI to be more productive. So why are you more exhausted than ever? The paradox every engineer needs to confront.

Me: Let’s see how the FairPhone folks are doing… maybe I was overly harsh on them and they’ve used the time to wean themselves off of Google… what with being Waag and all…
Also me: fucking what the fuck now?
*sigh* 🤬

Der Klimawandel ist real und bedroht die Ernährung im bevölkerungsreichsten Land der Erde, berichtet mein Kollege @… aus Indien.
"Die traditionellen Anbauflächen werden aufgrund des Salzgehalts und der Bodendegradation um 15-20% schrumpfen."
Geopolitical conflicts derail global fight against hunger amid climate threats, scienti…

Geopolitical conflicts derail global fight against hunger amid climate threats, scientists warn
NEW DELHI: India could lose a significant share of its land, crop productivity and nutritional quality due to climate change-induced rising temperatures, partic

Weekend #Plankton Factoid 🦠🦐
While I have often talked about eutrophication (high nutrients leading to excess algae production), systems worldwide have also undergone oligotrophication: productivity reduction from nutrient decline or ecosystem changes. While lakes becoming clearer is often viewed positively, this results in food web alterations and loss of culturally and commercially importa…

Interesting read, it illustrates the challenge we have with regard to learning in a world with AI. We have to take measures for that because use of AI in coding is not going away and will only increase.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20245

How AI Impacts Skill Formation
AI assistance produces significant productivity gains across professional domains, particularly for novice workers. Yet how this assistance affects the development of skills required to effectively supervise AI remains unclear. Novice workers who rely heavily on AI to complete unfamiliar tasks may compromise their own skill acquisition in the process. We conduct randomized experiments to study how developers gained mastery of a new asynchronous programming library with and without the assistanc…

The claim "you won't be replaced by AI, but by a person using AI" is nonsense. The Block layoff victims were some of the most productive, #llm pilled people in the company, but it didn't save them, because that's not what layoffs are about.
The layoff script goes, as always:
- overhire
- lay everyone off
- pretend it's because of

"AI layoffs" like Block's are a race to the bottom that have nothing to do with productivity.
You won't be replaced by AI, nor a person using AI, because backfills aren't real.

A study of 12K EU companies finds AI adoption increases labor productivity by 4% on average in the EU, with no evidence of reduced employment in the short run (CEPR)
https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/how-ai-affecting-productivity-and-jobs-europe

If you're not a programmer—"lines of code written" is a completely absurd metric to measure productivity for software development.
It's like paying a cook by the amount of salt they use.

> We find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without delivering significant efficiency gains on average.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20245

Yes, AI could boost productivity, but work is about more than maximising output https://theconversation.com/yes-ai-could-boost-productivity-but-work-is-about-more-than-maximising-output-278121

Yes, AI could boost productivity, but work is about more than maximising output
Work needs to deliver security, fairness and social value as well as efficiency.

Using LLMs to create the illusion of productivity and other essays I will pretend to write: an anthology

There is a follow-up for the famous METR study and like wow
(…) we believe that the data from our new experiment gives us an unreliable signal of the current productivity effect of AI tools. The primary reason is that we have observed a significant increase in developers choosing not to participate in the study because they do not wish to work without AI, which likely biases downwards our estimate of AI-assisted speedup.

We are Changing our Developer Productivity Experiment Design

A survey of almost 6,000 corporate execs across the US, UK, Germany, and Australia found that
more than 80 percent detect no discernible impact from AI on either employment or productivity.
The study from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in Massachusetts is based on input from CFOs, CEOs, and executives at enterprises of different sizes across the four countries.
On average, 69 percent of businesses currently use some form of AI, and 75 percent expect to use …

6,000 execs struggle to find the AI productivity boom
: Survey says 80% of firms see no gains from the tech

Some interesting figures from a new report by the Energy Transition Commission:
All electric cars are more energy efficient than plug-in hybrid and combustion engine vehicles, and weight is much less of a factor (in part due to regenerative braking).
https://www.

Faster than understanding
"Is this really a productivity boost? Probably only for people who do not care about whether or not they produce software that works correctly."
Oof, that captures the core concern with AI "work" painfully well.
https://phpunit.expert/a…

Faster than understanding
An AI coding agent implemented a complex software metric in 15 minutes. I have now spent hours trying to figure out whether the implementation is correct. Is this really a productivity boost?

How the House Slumped to Historic Lows of Productivity in 2025 (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/01/17/us/politics/house-republicans-majority-productivity.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/260117/p15#a260117p15

Wonder how many folks have joined the waitlist... https://office.eu/

LLMs are masters of the "Understood"—the vast library of human output. But they lack "Understanding"—the creative spark that generates those concepts in the first place.
https://www.ocrampal.com/the-understood-understanding-gap-why-llms-hit-…

The Understood-Understanding Gap: Why LLMs Hit a Wall
Large Language Models have become ubiquitous in knowledge work, yet a curious pattern has emerged. Talk to consultants at McKinsey, BCG, Bain, and you'll hear the same refrain: "I don't really know how I can leverage AI to boost my productivity beyond research and brainstorming." The same applies to programmers,

From the IMF
"the Canadian economy remains much less integrated than its global footprint would suggest. Goods, services, and workers face significant barriers when moving across provincial and territorial lines—a fragmentation that affects productivity, competitiveness, and overall resilience"
Most of the benefits would flow to the smaller provinces
#Canpoli

Canada Can Grow Faster by Unlocking Its Own Market
Knocking down internal trade barriers could boost output in Canada by 7 perc

AI coding agents are fueling productivity panic among executives and engineers, as a UCB study finds those offloading work to AI are also working longer hours (Issie Lapowsky/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Why Are You Even Like That?!
We inherited relationship structures, absorbed our parents' values, mistook productivity for worth, and called it normal...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: https://www.greataustralianpods.com/why-are-you-even-like-that/

Anthropic Study: #AI #Coding Assistance Reduces Developer Skill #Mastery by 17%

At this point, if you don't find AI tools useful for code generation, that's a skill issue.
(The issue is that you are an actually competent programmer who knows how to do things like abstract boilerplate code into a helper function or practice test-driven development, and therefore you recognize the AI tool "assistance" as a net productivity loss. If you aren't good enough on your own that AI slows you down, the "speedup" you'll experience can only come at a crippling quality cost, which you might not even be able to recognize until it's too late.)
#AI #LLMs #VibeCoding

Measles outbreaks could cost the U.S. over a $1 billion a year, if vaccine rates decline https://www.nbcnews.com/health/kids-health/measles-cost-vaccine-rates-decline-billion-year-forecast-rcna260734

Measles outbreaks could cost the U.S. over a $1 billion a year, if vaccine rates decline
In 2026, there have been over 1,000 cases of measles. If vaccination rates keep dropping, the costs of medical care, public health efforts and lost work productivity could skyrocket.

This can’t possibly be a unique observation, but generative AI boosters, if they’re not pedophiles, seem to be primarily engaging in productivity aesthetic, which is to say, lifestyle blogging their way through pointless busy work

New #VS2026 Insiders update brings fast scrolling, middle‑click scroll, HTML‑rich copy/paste, slimmer margins, colorized completions, partial‑accept suggestions, and streamlined Markdown preview. Small changes, big gains in flow. #visualstudio

Vor etwas mehr als sechs Jahren bin ich von Taskwarrior auf Todoist gewechselt.
Die Preiserhöhung bei Todoist hat bei mir einen Denkprozess angestossen und dafür gesorgt, dass ich nach Alternativen geschaut habe.
Nach intensiven Tests mit "Super Productivity"; "Vikunja" und "Logseq" zur Aufgabenverwaltung bin ich jetzt wieder zurück bei Taskwarrior.
Als Webfrontent (funktioniert im Querformat auch sehr gut auf dem Mobiltelefon) setze ich Taskw…

The blog was very quiet this month, but behind the scenes, it was a month full of productivity! :)
#blog

"New #words – 26 January 2026" @ Cambridge dictionaries:
"FOBO" 'abbreviation for “fear of becoming obsolete”', "vibe revenue" 'money or funding that an #AI company is given because people are excited about the potential of AI, rather than because the com…

Editors and freelance journalists say AI has brought more productivity, increased expectations of speed, a need for more vetting, and sometimes job-loss fears (Marina Adami/Nieman Lab)
https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/how-ai-is-transforming-freelance-journalis…

How AI is transforming freelance journalism
One freelancer said he's been offering editors access to his Google Docs version histories as evidence that he does the writing himself.

One of the biggest reasons now that I think I may stay as a freelancer and not job hunt is that I don't want to be forced to use some "productivity" suite like #google #docs or #microsoft

Diese Forderungen nach „mehr arbeiten“ und „mehr im Büro sein“ sind schon ein wenig gegensätzlich, oder?
The Meetings Will Continue
Until Productivity Improves

"Selon l'analyse du cabinet [Oxford Economics], « les entreprises ne semblent pas remplacer leurs employés par l'IA Š grande échelle », ce qui suggère plutôt qu'elles pourraient utiliser cette technologie comme prétexte pour réduire leurs effectifs de manière systématique."

When articles talk about ‘productivity’ (“UK companies saw an average 11.5% productivity increase thanks to AI”) are they subjective (“I felt more productive”) or objective like “GDP per hour”? ‘cause 11% GDP growth would be amazeballs, and “email faster” less so…
https://www.

Weekend #Plankton Factoid 🦠🦐
In recent years it has been found that phytoplankton productivity can be fueled by deep-sea hydrothermal vents. These vents produce iron and dense microbial blooms which can locally stimulate algae blooms, but it wasn't clear how this linkage of ecosystems separated by kilometers was possible. Now, an Antarctic study suggests that earthquakes can cause violen…

Seeing a lot of people getting into tiled and scrolling window managers.
I actually like my desktop with overlapping windows and being a bit in a chaotic state and slightly different all the time.
My brain needs some variety and breaks from orderly processes, because I'm a human being and I've evolved to work best in semi-chaotic circumstances.
Obviously you do you but I'm considering this trend at least to some degree productivity wankery.

I am drooling at the new UI elements in this new batch of apps coming out:
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/01/introducing-apple-creator-studio-an-inspiring-collection-of-creative-apps/

Apple introduces Apple Creator Studio, an inspiring collection of the most powerful creative apps
Apple Creator Studio is a collection of powerful creative apps for making music, video editing, creative imaging, and visual productivity.

'Automate tasks, not jobs' - a great headline from a report on 'the AI opportunity for Scotland’s public services' https://stormid.com/research/

Automate tasks, not jobs: The AI opportunity for Scotland’s public services
Independent analysis identifying the highest value public sector workflows for AI driven productivity gains.

Bridging Distant Ideas: the Impact of AI on R&D and Recombinant Innovation
Emanuele Bazzichi, Massimo Riccaboni, Fulvio Castellacci
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.02189 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.02189 https://arxiv.org/html/2604.02189
arXiv:2604.02189v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study how artificial intelligence (AI) affects firms' incentives to pursue incremental versus radical knowledge recombinations. We develop a model of recombinant innovation embedded in a Schumpeterian quality-ladder framework, in which innovation arises from recombining ideas across varying distances in a knowledge space. R&D consists of multiple tasks, a fraction of which can be performed by AI. AI facilitates access to distant knowledge domains, but at the same time it also increases the aggregate rate of creative destruction, shortening the monopoly duration that rewards radical innovations. Moreover, excessive reliance on AI may reduce the originality of research and lead to duplication of research efforts. We obtain three main results. First, higher AI productivity encourages more distant recombinations, if the direct facilitation effect is stronger than the indirect effect due to intensified competition from rivals. Second, the effect of increasing the share of AI-automated R&D tasks is non-monotonic: firms initially target more radical innovations, but beyond a threshold of human-AI complementarity, they shift the focus toward incremental innovations. Third, in the limiting case of full automation, the model predicts that optimal recombination distance collapses to zero, suggesting that fully AI-driven research would undermine the very knowledge creation that it seeks to accelerate.
toXiv_bot_toot

I think this brings me up to five separate Atlassian accounts now 🙃

China faces a dilemma as it looks to balance productivity gains from AI with labor displacement risks due to automation, which could trigger an economic spiral (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-27/x…

Dear #Apple
"macOS Tahoe introduces a stunning new design, along with delightful ways to work across your devices and boost your productivity."
as Bob Dylan yelled on the stage in London.... "You are a Liar" I don't beleive you"

Australia was once a world leader in innovation. A new report shows the system is now ‘broken’
https://theconversation.com/australia-was-once-a-wo…

Australia was once a world leader in innovation. A new report shows the system is now ‘broken’
Australia spends less on research and development than most of the developed world, and our productivity growth is the lowest in decades.

Tackling complex tasks can feel like taming chaos, but classical music is a brilliant remedy. A well-composed symphony turns chaos into clarity. 🎻 Personally, it elevates my focus and productivity. Do you harness music to boost your performance? 🎶 Let's orchestrate success with the right rhythm!

Exploring Performance-Productivity Trade-offs in AMT Runtimes: A Task Bench Study of Itoyori, ItoyoriFBC, HPX, and MPI
Torben R. Lahnor, Mia Reitz, Jonas Posner, Patrick Diehl
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.14608

My morning routine consists of 1) waking up and 2) winging it until lunchtime.
Follow me for more productivity advice.

Organisations that have routinely provided the shittiest desktops and laptops to their staff are now convinced that AI will be transformative to productivity.

The opposite of productivity is conductivity, and I'm 0Ω

Windows 11 finally has a real sudo command (since 24H2) 🚀
Run admin commands directly in the terminal without reopening PowerShell as Administrator. Small change — huge productivity boost.
#Windows11 #DevTools

So, "#AI boosted your productivity"? Well, are you a software developer or a factory worker?
Productivity is a measure of predictable output from repetitive processes. It is how much shit your factory floor produces. Of course, once attempts to boost productivity start affecting the quality of your product, things get hairy…
"Productivity" makes no sense for creative work. It makes zero sense for software developers. If your work is defined by productivity, then it makes no sense to use as #LLM to improve it. You can be replaced entirely.
Artists get that. The fact that many software developers don't suggests that the trade took a wrong turn at some point.
Inspired by #NoAI

AuDHD IRL
A podcast about what it really looks like to be autistic ADHD, beyond the hot takes, highlight reels, and productivity hacks...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: https://www.greataustralianpods.com/audhd-irl/

RE: https://toot.cat/@plexus/116283016837715719
It should also be noted that beyond the ethical, political and environmental issues with this is that it doesn't work:
1. There is on average no mid to long term productivity gain with actual real-world software development that isn't just a "wow see what it can do" demo. (Multiple studies have shown that now.)
2. It won't help with 90% of the work when professionally making software, which, believe it or not, isn't coding. 90% of the work is designing and planning the software (these are things that happen both upfront and during development).
Maybe you have seen the recent Microsoft thing rolling back features in Windows they added?
E.g. Copilot in Notepad. What they did is essentially outsourcing project management to developers who then outsourced it to LLMs. But an LLMs can't plan and design software, and arguably barely can even generate code that works (as in reliable and performant). So now they have a buggy mess with features no one wants and they're rolling it back.
There's no silver bullets in software development.

Dow plans to cut 4,500 staff to save costs and will rely on AI to boost productivity, resulting in $1.1B to $1.5B in charges; it currently employs ~34,000 staff (Rob Curran/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/business/earnings/dow-<…

#Webdevelopment is fun again
#CodingAssistants

Symbolic.ai, founded by ex-eBay CEO Devin Wenig and Ars Technica cofounder Jon Stokes, partners with News Corp to offer AI tools to WSJ, Barron's, and others (Ben Sherry/Inc)
https://www.inc.com/ben-sherry/this-ai-startup-just-lan…

This AI Startup Just Landed a Deal That Could Transform Newsrooms
Exclusive: An AI-based journalism platform aims to do it all. Can it deliver the accuracy and productivity it promises?

An analytical model of Disequilibrium and decentralized productive Exploration
Nazaria Solferino
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.00718 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.00718 https://arxiv.org/html/2604.00718
arXiv:2604.00718v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: This paper studies the economic role of persistent dispersion in allocations across agents. We develop a tractable model in which firms allocate resources under imperfect information and behavioral updating, generating sustained heterogeneity in beliefs and actions. While dispersion induces static misallocation, it also fosters decentralized experimentation, allowing the economy to explore a broader set of productive opportunities. We show that the economy converges to a stationary equilibrium with strictly positive dispersion and that, under plausible conditions, such disequilibrium can dominate the perfectly coordinated benchmark. The model provides a novel interpretation of observed dispersion in productivity and returns as reflecting both inefficiency and productive exploration. It also yields testable predictions linking dispersion to growth and innovation dynamics.
toXiv_bot_toot

#LLM tools let you write code faster, but LOCs has NEVER been the bottleneck to value. The bottleneck is organizational coherence.
Instead of working towards that alignment, we are encouraged to "just #AI it." The result? AI makes everyone work MORE, with no real productivity gains.
Te…

Research is leadership, and code can help (but only in the right places)
Code was never the blocker in delivering customer value — and the easier writing code becomes, the more it distracts from the work we must do to unblock productivity.

Leaked memo: Meta's Reality Labs is reorganizing staff into AI-native "pods" focused on specific outcomes, flattening the organization's leadership structure (Charles Rollet/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/metas-real

Inside Meta's push to turn employees into "AI builders" and reorganize teams around small pods
Meta Reality Labs is reorganizing to be 'AI-native,' forming pods of 'AI builders.' The change aims to boost productivity at Meta.

Can’t wait for the unquestionably super annoying in-app upsells in the free versions of Apple’s productivity apps
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/01/introducing-apple-creator-studio-an-inspiring-collection-of-creative-apps/

Sources: Jeff Bezos said "I don't care" after WaPo leaders told him changes to the Opinion section could turn off subscribers; 60K canceled their subs in Feb. (New York Times)
https://www.nytim…

How Jeff Bezos Upended The Washington Post
The billionaire newspaper owner, dissatisfied by years of losses, wants the newsroom to double productivity with half its budget.

Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus review: unbelievable app performance, big price cut, and improvements over the 265K, but mediocre at gaming and large power demands (Jake Roach/Tom's Hardware)
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intel-core-ultr…

Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus review: Back from the brink
Unbelievable productivity performance at an even more unbelievable price – shame gaming still takes a backseat.

I wrote 500 words yesterday. Then deleted 600. Productivity. #Writer #Writerslife #author #Creativetoots

Workers describe a deteriorating culture at Jack Dorsey's Block as morale plunges amid rolling layoffs and a push to use AI tools to improve productivity (Reece Rogers/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/inside-rolling-layoffs-jack-dorsey-block/

Inside the Rolling Layoffs at Jack Dorsey’s Block
Workers describe a deteriorating culture at Block, the company behind Square and Cash App, where layoffs continue and employees are expected to use AI tools daily.

Analysis: US productivity rose by ~2.7% in 2025, nearly doubling the 1.4% annual average over a decade, as AI-exposed sectors cooled their entry-level hiring (Erik Brynjolfsson/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/4b51d0b4-bbfe-4f05-b50a-1d485d419dc5

Jensen Huang proposes a compensation model where engineers receive an AI token budget on top of their base salary, to deploy agents as productivity multipliers (Anniek Bao/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/20/nvidia-ai-agent…

Nvidia's Huang pitches AI tokens on top of salary as agents reshape how humans work
Most enterprise AI projects have failed since 2018, a sobering track record for an industry awash in enthusiasm.

I wrote 500 words yesterday. Then deleted 600. Productivity. #Writer #Writerslife #author #Creativetoots

Companies are starting to track employees' AI token use and tallying the costs to measure their return on AI investments, and to prevent potential token abuse (Katherine Bindley/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-tokens-prod

Anthropic researchers say rich countries' higher AI use risks deepening economic disparities and widening living standard gaps, driven by productivity gains (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/3ad44e30-c738-4356-91fb-8bb2368685c4

Symbolic.ai, founded by ex-eBay CEO Devin Wenig and Ars Technica cofounder Jon Stokes, partners with News Corp to offer AI tools to WSJ, Barron's, and others (Ben Sherry/Inc)
https://www.inc.com/ben-sherry/this-ai-startup-just-lan…

This AI Startup Just Landed a Deal That Could Transform Newsrooms
Exclusive: An AI-based journalism platform aims to do it all. Can it deliver the accuracy and productivity it promises?

Anthropic says Claude for Excel and Claude for PowerPoint now share full context across open files, and skills are available inside Excel and PowerPoint add-ins (Sabrina Ortiz/The Deep View)
https://www.thedeepview.com/articles/claude-strengthens-its-excel…

Michael Burry, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, and Dwarkesh Patel on the future of AI, whether AI tools improve productivity, job losses due to AI, and more (The Substack Post)
https://post.substack.com/p/the-ai-revolution-is-here-will-the

The AI revolution is here. Will the economy survive the transition?
The man who predicted the 2008 crash, Anthropic’s co-founder, and a leading AI podcaster jump into a Google doc to debate the future of AI—and, possibly, our lives

If my business was failing and I had to fire thousands of people I'd say it's because of AI productivity gains too.