Nikunj Kothari

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-it 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/Hickey_Rich/… 996 sounds like garbage on its own, as a system of toil. But I also very much respect an idea of…