What happens when AI makes you ten times more productive but you end up working more, not less?
Steve Yegge’s “AI Vampire” essay describes founders and early adopters who are setting, in his words, “the unrealistic beauty standards of AI” for everyone else. People running 40-hour sprints with AI. People with four subscriptions running simultaneously. People like me.
This week I’m being honest about my experience. I’ve used Claude Code and Claude Co-work to redesign how my entire company operates. The work of ten people, done better, done faster. But I haven’t taken a single hour back for myself yet.
Harvard Business Review research published this month calls it work intensification. I call it “that’s my life.”
I talk about the two paths AI might take us down (mass unemployment or mass burnout), why leaders need to sit with this discomfort rather than pretend it doesn’t exist, and what I’m reconsidering about how I model AI adoption for my team.
Sources & citations
- Steve Yegge — “The AI Vampire” (Medium)
- Harvard Business Review — “AI Doesn’t Reduce Work, It Intensifies It” (February 2026)
