Leisure happens
Well, initially, I think it means we’ll get more free time. The productivity gains that turn eight hours of work into two won’t suddenly mean we get six more hours of work piled on. Instead, we get what Fabian Stelzer has dubbed “dark leisure”—the notion that your manager doesn’t know yet that you’re five times as productive, so instead of doing five times the work, you speed up by a factor of only two and surf the web the rest of the time. Your boss sees more work and you keep up with the latest cat memes.
But that will catch up with us eventually. I’ve written about the Jevons Paradox, and that comes into play as much as Parkinson’s law does. Gradually, as managers and ambitious devs start putting agentic tools to work more efficiently, we’ll see demand for more software, and dark leisure time will get filled with more work.
We’ve seen this before. Back in the early days of Windows, it was a serious pain to create a simple Windows application. You had to write many lines of C/C++ code just to make a blank form appear on the screen. Adding a simple button was even more effort. Eventually, though, tools like Delphi and Visual Basic made putting a button on a form child’s play.
