jpmitchellThe first 40 months of the AI era
> To what degree did I expand scope because I knew I could do more using the AI?
Someone at work recently termed this “Claude Creep”. It’s so easy to generate things push you towards going further but the reality is that’s you’re setting yourself up for more and more work to get them over the line.
the flip side of claude creep is that the easy parts are now genuinely free, which means all your time goes to the 30% that was already hard. ai doesn't save you time on the hard bits, it just eliminates the excuse to not have done the easy bits first.what's helped: think in postconditions, not tasks. instead of 'add feature X', define 'the tests pass and the user can do Y'. the agent figures out what X means. without that anchor there's nothing to mark as done, so scope drifts indefinitely.
100%
Over the years I've amassed hundreds of code boilerplate snippets/templates that I would copy and paste and the modify, and now they're all just sitting in Obsidian gathering dust.
Why would I waste my time copying and pasting when I can just have Claude generate me basic ansible playbooks on the spot in 30 seconds.
Over the years I've amassed hundreds of code boilerplate snippets/templates that I would copy and paste and the modify, and now they're all just sitting in Obsidian gathering dust.
Why would I waste my time copying and pasting when I can just have Claude generate me basic ansible playbooks on the spot in 30 seconds.
Some of the expanded scope that I’ve done almost for free is usually around UX polish and accessibility. I even completely redid the —help for a few CLI tools I have when I would never have invested over an hour on each before agents.
I agree that the efficiency and quality are very hard to measure. I’m extremely confident that when used well, agents are a huge gain for both though. When used poorly, it is just slop you can make really fast.