FOMO is at an all-time high in software. While you were eating breakfast, my agent swarm coded a clone of your app and by dinner one of us will be bankrupt. So, naturally, you should start skipping breakfast to get ahead.
Thus is the sage philosophy underpinning the average 996 startup. We work longer, which means we work harder, which means we work better, which means we win. You snooze you lose, as the saying goes. The office floor should be slick with blood, sweat, and tears.
There's a similar concept you might hear at basketball training camps: while you're sleeping in, someone else is getting shots up. Who wants it more?
With the vastly increased pace of software development, there's a much stronger sense of FOMO. When you take an hour break, before you were just missing a few hundred lines of code, if that. A small chunk of a new feature. Now that hour could be spent building out a new platform from scratch. This FOMO extends to a recent batch of scrappy startups, who lean into the 996 lifestyle, and often proudly proclaim so on directly on their job postings.
It's clear that the once maligned 996 attitude, once looked down upon as a symptom of a toxic Chinese work environment, has made it mainstream.
The obvious problem, of course, is that AI advances are here for everyone. The marginal advantage of your one hour over competitors is the same as it was before, even if it looks way different on the ground. There is no extra advantage to working those extra hours that has happened before.
*If anything, the best use of time now is maximizing LLM-usage - the compounding effects are stronger than before.
This is all not to say that working more is strictly stupid - sometimes there are moments where a key delivery is needed, or key systems are down. In those moments, every hour available is needed to triumph. But these should remain safely considered cases of extreme urgency, never the default mode of being.
Ultimately, we should remember that the promise of AI is a future where we need to work less and not more.
Let's build the future we want.