I can happily sit with coffee and code for 16 hours straight. That's not a flex—that's just how I'm wired. But I want to be honest about something: the moment this becomes real client work, something fundamental changes. It takes more energy than traditional coding ever did.
I've been thinking about this a lot. If AI makes me 10x faster, shouldn't I only need to work 4 hours a day? The math makes sense. But the reality doesn't track.
The thing is, working with AI requires a different kind of attention. It's not the deep, single-threaded flow state of traditional coding. It's more like... constant decision-making. Constant evaluation. Is this going the right direction? Should I course-correct? Did the agent misunderstand? Let me reframe that. What's the next step? It's cognitively heavier, even though it's faster.
When I'm in hobby mode—just experimenting, exploring, scratching an itch—my brain treats it differently. There are natural pauses. Moments to breathe. I can sustain that for hours. But client work is different. The stakes are higher. The attention required is tighter. And yeah, my workdays have actually gotten longer, not shorter.
I think this is pointing to something real about how work is changing. The classical contract—you work X hours for Y salary—assumes a linear relationship between time and output. But AI blows that up. If I'm producing 10x more per hour, but I can only sustain intense focus for 4 hours... what does the contract even mean? Does it get renegotiated? Should it?
I don't think we're heading toward 4-day workweeks just yet. If anything, I suspect the opposite—that we're about to discover the work patterns that actually make sense with AI. And those might be nothing like what we've been doing.
Maybe it's not about hours at all. Maybe it's about output, outcomes, problems solved. Maybe the future looks like project-based work where you commit to a result, not a schedule. That would be radically different from everything we know.
Or maybe I'm just tired from 16 hours of coding and thinking too big about it. Either way, something's shifting. I can feel it. We're not going to slip back into the old rhythm. This new pace, this new kind of work—it demands a rethinking of everything we thought we knew about productivity and how we structure our time.
Part of the #100DaysToOffload documenting agentic development in 2026