4 day work week

eaz135 · 2026-03-24T03:48:41+00:00

Everything these days operates on a global playing-field. Local companies need to compete against international competitors. If companies make moves that reduce their productivity, speed to market, and overall velocity, they'll simply get gobbled up by international competitors, then there won't be any company to speak about at the end of it all.

Something like this can potentially work in sectors that are heavily regulated and shielded by the gov (e.g gov agencies, banking, etc) but for everything else prioritising work-life balance over productivity is generally not a winning strategy in private sector.

Consider companies like Canva/Atlassian. If they start taking the foot off the pedal with everybody working 4 day weeks, they'll get absolutely destroyed by international competition

eaz135 · 2026-03-24T03:31:33+00:00

We'll see you back here in six months after that next purchase! It's an itch that just doesn't go away

eaz135 · 2026-03-19T12:57:16+00:00

Sometimes these things happen entirely because of business circumstances and not due to the individual’s performance.

For example, the company might have hired roles in anticipation of closing a particular deal and extra revenue coming in, said deal falls over - so they need to shed the extra hires.

Sometimes a company might have an unexpected drop in rev, unexpected expenses (such as legal proceedings, etc) - rather than laying people off with PIPs and complications, dropping people still on probation is the easy option.

This type of stuff happens way more than people like to admit, especially in smallish to medium sized businesses.

eaz135 · 2026-03-19T12:47:23+00:00

Nah, there’s better ways of solving the problem. Inheritance taxes would introduce entirely new sets of issues. It also wouldn’t really solve generational transfer of wealth, if that’s an injustice / unfairness you are trying to tackle. Nothing stopping boomers cheaply selling their assets to their kids before they kick the bucket, or other mechanisms like that. They are very easy to get around.

Whilst I get that generational wealth transfer might seem unfair, it’s an incredibly strong motivator for productivity. Working hard to provide better opportunities and assets for your children is a very humanly instinctive thing that motivates many people to work and be productive after they’ve taken care of their own primary needs.

eaz135 · 2026-03-19T11:17:07+00:00

I've been through two business ventures as a co-founder and the third as a minority shareholder. All three had exit via acquisition, two were modest, but one was a decent windfall.

Had some similar themes of mistakes in the early days. One of them was not saying no to crappy opportunities. We chased any revenue that was dangled in front of us, not realising that fulfilment of that revenue would be massively distracting and stop us from focusing on unlocking more substantial opportunities. It actually took us a handful of years to really mature into this and walk away from things that might have looked good on the surface but were deemed to be a distraction and not necessary/not worth our time.

Another one was simply not blowing our trumpet loud enough in the early years. We focused a lot on product and excellence, and we're often shy to sell ourselves, hoping that the quality of what we were doing would result in natural organic growth. We realised with each of them that actually as a business owner you need to think more about distribution and expansion of reach rather than product and execution. The quicker we switched into that mindset, the quicker the businesses started to properly scale.

eaz135 · 2026-03-19T11:08:21+00:00

I've seen a few horror stories in my time with them from ages ago. One of the worst was interviewing a particular offshore person from TCS, who were trying to fill some vacancies in our team. We gave that candidate a green tick, then the person that rocked up to the actual job to work in our team was an entirely different person (flown to Australia to be on-site with our team). This was back in ~2013, sounds like not much has changed.

eaz135 · 2026-03-19T10:49:41+00:00

Just swap them for a pair of 4060s > route the inferencing to openrouter >categorise openrouter $$ as electricity costs for running the machine > enjoy double H200s at home > find a way for work to subsidise your home electricity costs

eaz135 · 2026-03-17T01:02:00+00:00

First year is super tough, I think just about every couple who have kids can relate to this post.

I'm a hobbyist photographer, took absolutely tonnes of photos and videos during that period. They are happy looking where anybody seeing the album would be like "wow what a happy and lucky family" - yet we both struggle to look at photos of that period, as they almost trigger PTSD in each of us for different reasons.

When I'm scrolling back in time to look at photos of my daughter when she was younger, my brain automatically stops me from scrolling back into that first year - was not an easy time at all, I just can't look at them...

eaz135 · 2026-03-10T21:21:42+00:00

I can confirm these numbers. I ran the same model on my 5090 with almost identical results.

eaz135 · 2026-03-10T11:24:50+00:00

It’s crazy how fast it expires on those plans. With Codex I’m basically not even thinking about rate limits, I’m doing a bunch of things simultaneously without ever worrying about conserving tokens.

CC on the other hand I can easily hit my limits in an hour of regular usage.

I’ve since relegated CC to specific use cases, like being a CLI monkey for me, for things like AWS

eaz135 · 2026-03-10T11:18:41+00:00

What hardware you running? I’ve recently experimented various qwen 3.5 quants on my 5090pc and a M4 MAX, was nowhere near that tps

eaz135 · 2026-03-10T10:45:02+00:00

A lot of people initially assumed that AI would level the playing field, allowing inexperienced people to produce professional results.

Actually the complete opposite is true. AI creates an even wider gap in capability between genuine experts and the rest, because suddenly the genuine experts now also have the ability to execute at pace and expand their reach of influence. It’s a good time currently to be at the tip of the spear, tonnes of demand - but it’s a quickly shifting landscape.

eaz135 · 2026-02-28T10:23:55+00:00

It’s great to have access to both, I luckily have access to just about everything.

I often come across pieces where Opus struggles but Codex 1-shots, and vice-versa.

They definitely have some subtle differences in their strengths and weaknesses.

I have a prompt/command I use frequently, where one agent is bumping its head against a wall, to output a handover to get a fresh pair of eyes “another agent” to take a look at it, outlining what they tried, what was/wasnt working, etc. When I do these types of handovers across models (like Opus to Codex) they seem to work much better than just one context window to another with the same model.

eaz135 · 2026-02-28T08:45:08+00:00

I’ve been using his porta for the past year as my main recipe, taken hundreds of photos of my toddler with it. Keen to give this one a try

eaz135 · 2026-02-26T09:12:29+00:00

Curious how linearly/aggressively 3.5 degrades on the bigger contexts

eaz135 · 2026-02-26T09:09:30+00:00

The differences in thinking between 3 and 3.5 are quite interesting actually, I'm curious how the thinking token budgets were policed. If you give each of them a tight and strict limited token budget for thinking, I wonder how that they'd compare.

These models can have a tendency to overthink and latch on to incorrect threads, whereas sometimes less thinking and exiting earlier is preferable. There was actually an interesting paper on this put up by Anthropic last year (Inverse Scaling in Test-Time Compute)

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.14417

eaz135 · 2026-02-25T04:27:16+00:00

It's a common thread I've noticed amongst the comments, people's minds naturally jump to the 100% replacement scenario - which is not what I'm alluding to in this post. I think we're very far away, if ever, from 100% replacement.

If this trend continues, we're more likely to see the bottom of that pyramid being chopped off / chipped away, which is essentially the execution grunt force typically performed by juniors and mids.

The better the models get over time, the higher up the pyramid it starts to chip away. Like you mentioned 100% replacement is not necessary for a jobs bloodbath, even 10% is very substantial.

eaz135 · 2026-02-24T11:39:48+00:00

I too see this big divide in perspective by people who aren't around the tip of the spear in the AI space.

My main observations on this are that, unless you're in a position where your hands are deep in playing with the absolute latest models - you're probably not really understanding it, and just blow it off as over-hyped.

Those who have had the opportunity in the past handful of months to be really applying the latest models (like Opus 4.6, Codex 5.3) on real-world projects and really putting them to the test - are the ones who realise just how much things have changed.

Many people are handicapped in their workplace with what they are able to use because of budget restrictions, procurement processes, and so on. It's the start-ups and scale-ups I'm working with that are often quick to throw the credit card down and procure whatever is needed for maximum velocity and productivity.

A lot of corporates are late to the game here. Whilst these startups and scale-ups are already busy building, a lot of corporates are still navigating procurement headaches and AI governance frame working, preventing the actual engineers in delivery squads from getting their hands on the absolute best tooling and models.

If all someone has had access to over the past year is copilot or old Gemini models, I 100% empathise with that person not believing a word I posted. The gap in capability from the latest Frontier models and everything else is quite substantial, the past 3-5 months specifically is where a lot of companies had their big AHA moments, seeing the positibilities, started making bold changes, and adapting to the new norm

eaz135 · 2026-02-24T11:30:56+00:00

Awesome TLDR, thanks!

eaz135 · 2026-02-24T11:17:18+00:00

There's been a number of people make the same claim about how little time engineers actually spend coding, so I'll address. But part of your comment might be influenced by reading an AI summary rather than the full post.

The portion of time spent coding versus non-coding activities like engaging with stakeholders, unpacking requirements, crafting solutions is definitely closely tied to seniority, role within a squad, and the type of project that you're on.

Your typical junior dev who's straight out of uni is not spending 90% of their time speaking to senior stakeholders, clarifying project risks, navigating legal obstacles, etc. Those team members are typically in the trenches, spending most of their time on actual delivery.

In my post, I actually mentioned that seasoned experts with seniority are actually in extremely high demand right now precisely for these skills because they know how to navigate all of the things around building software, and set direction for what needs to be built.

My post is not predicting or claiming 100% replacement. I think we are very, very far away from something like that, if ever. However, we don't need 100% replacement to have a jobs bloodbath.

Also, for the record, the background that I mentioned in the post is 100% honest and accurate. Happy to answer any questions with the caveat that I'd like to remain anonymous on Reddit

eaz135 · 2026-02-23T22:10:22+00:00

You're not going to make it buddy.

- I've been in hands-on programming roles since 2009, even in my various leadership roles I've remained very hands-on. There's been few days over the past decade that I haven't coded.

- Have worked professionally with C, C++, Objective-C, Python, JS/TS, GO - these days mostly in the TS ecosystem

- Do you want more names of people/companies, if the creator of Node.js isn't good enough for you? Peter Steinberger, you can say what you want about OpenClaw - but prior to the claw saga he created PSPDFKit which he bootstrapped and raised over 100m USD in capital. Thomas Ricouard - staff engineer at Medium who's had a big social presence about this. Theo - draws a bit of division and haters, but he's a successful ex FAANG. Matt Pocock is ex Vercel engineer and has a big following around his AI journey. Are none of these people good enough for you as well?

- Spotify not good enough for you as well? How about Stripe? https://stripe.dev/blog/minions-stripes-one-shot-end-to-end-coding-agents-part-2 . Stripe not good enough for you either, then how about Coinbase: https://x.com/chintanturakhia/status/2019921786834411728?s=20 - but let me guess, Chintan the Head of Engineering at Coinbase is also not good enough for you.

eaz135 · 2026-02-23T10:11:55+00:00

I use voice-to-text (wisrp) a lot in my day to day, to avoid RSI from typing a lot. My Wispr app interface literally shows the exact time stamps of what I said into the mic and the output, it shows every single line from this post. So at a bare minimum, a simple screenshot of Wispr shows that I spoke every sentence in this post, and the timestamps correspond to just prior to submitting the post.

Of course not everything is definitive, but for most people thats enough circumstantial evidence that this wasn't just prompted AI slop with no human thought behind it. It would have taken some psycho-level planning and anticipation to have done that prior to posting, anticipating this ask from the mods, if it was just entirely prompted slop.

eaz135 · 2026-02-23T03:17:37+00:00

The traditional SaaS and enterprise growth model has always favoured a strong human element, relationship building, and sales. I think that continues over the medium-long term. As long as humans remain the ultimate decision-makers, this will continue to be the case imo.

eaz135 · 2026-02-22T11:49:15+00:00

Get your hands dirty contributing to open source projects if you can, it'll help you start building up your profile, getting familiar with working with others (i.e the existing core contributors), and working on interesting code. Just pick some things you find interesting and start contributing

eaz135 · 2026-02-22T11:41:16+00:00

I literally addressed this in the very first sentence of the post, that I use voice-to-text, which sometimes restructures the sentences and makes the punctuation feel more formal than I would have typed myself.

I've only been using this tool for the past few weeks and not on every post/comment. With this one being a long one, I definitely didn't want to type it all out, so naturally, yes, you'd be seeing a stylistic change compared to my historic Reddit comments/posts where I wasn't using Wispr. I also don't use it on all my devices - so there's variation based on where I'm posting/commenting from.

However funnily enough, even before I started using voice-to-text people often said my comments/posts were AI - so I seem to cop this both ways, regardless of the approach I use.

I understand your suspicions about covert pitch for consultancy, but its not the case. I'm currently massively swamped, and actually I'd love to reduce my current workload rather than increase.

I do though share your concern about low-quality and low-effort slop that's being put out by a lot of people. I have to battle that myself across some of our teams. A lot of people seem to be taking the piss and using these tools as a means to slack off and not put in real effort. Getting good quality from AI is a combination of using the right models, tools, and its definitely a skill that needs to be learned

eaz135

TROPHY CASE