Is AI Creating Unrealistic Expectations?

Is AI Making Us More Productive, or Are Unrealistic Expectations Pushing Us to Work More?

I've been thinking a lot lately about how AI is changing the workplace, particularly for those of us in software development. I'm curious whether others are experiencing something similar.

As a web developer, I've always taken pride in writing clean, maintainable code and building reusable components. Recently, I've been diving deeper into AI, agents, skills, and structured workflows. I genuinely believe AI has incredible potential to improve how we work.

But I've started wondering: Has the promise of AI productivity created unrealistic expectations for the people actually doing the work?

We've all heard the claims that AI can make us 5x or even 10x more productive. But does that mean developers should suddenly be expected to handle 5x or 10x the workload?

I recently went through an experience that really challenged my perspective.

I had three major projects with overlapping deadlines. To keep everything moving, I regularly found myself working 12-hour days, sometimes stretching to 18 hours.

For one particular project, I knew I wouldn't have the time to approach the code the way I normally would. So, under pressure, I leaned heavily on AI and essentially let it cook.

And let me tell you, that cooking was painful. 😂

AI got me about 60% of the way there. At first glance, the design looked decent. But once I started digging into the details, the responsiveness, fluidity, and overall user experience were nowhere near where they needed to be.

What initially looked like a time saver turned into weeks of troubleshooting, refining, and reworking the output just to get to a functional product.

And here's the part that really bothered me.

What I would typically expect to accomplish in roughly 3,000 lines of CSS ended up becoming approximately 14,000 lines!

Did the code work? Yes.

Did it meet the immediate business requirements? Yes.

Was it clean, readable, and maintainable? Not even close!

Was it code I was proud to put my name on? Absolutely not. Unfortunately, Visual Studio's Git blame feature makes sure my name stays attached to it. 😂

That experience really made me question something:

If AI helps us write code faster but leaves us with significantly more code to troubleshoot, maintain, and eventually refactor, how much time are we actually saving?

And I think this connects to a much bigger workplace conversation.

When organizations begin expecting AI level productivity gains without accounting for the time required to plan, review, test, troubleshoot, and maintain what AI generates, are we actually becoming more efficient?

Or are we simply accumulating technical debt at a faster rate?

Combine that with workforce reductions and the expectation that remaining employees absorb additional responsibilities, and I wonder whether we're creating an environment where the very technology intended to make work easier is actually making it more demanding.

For me, the workload eventually became unsustainable.

I hadn't taken a single day off in eight months. The long hours were beginning to affect my personal life and the time I had with my family.

After those projects were completed, I finally raised my hand and communicated that something needed to change.

I'm grateful that members of my immediate team and other leaders recognized what was happening, spoke up on my behalf, and offered support. That meant more to me than they probably realize.

And to be fair, I recognize that I played a part in this too.

I'm naturally a people pleaser, and I've had to learn that being a dependable team member doesn't mean saying yes to everything, especially when doing so comes at the expense of quality, sustainability, and family.

That's something I'm still working on.

I'm a team player. I want my colleagues to succeed. I want my organization to succeed. I take pride in delivering quality work and being someone others can depend on.

So here's what I'd really love to hear from this community:

Are you seeing unrealistic productivity expectations emerge in your workplace because of AI?
Have you noticed workloads increasing or teams getting smaller because of the assumption that AI can make up the difference?
How do you professionally push back on unrealistic expectations while still being viewed as someone who delivers?
How are you balancing the speed of AI-generated code with the responsibility of keeping your codebase clean, scalable, and maintainable?

I want to be clear: I'm not against AI. Quite the opposite!

I'm fascinated by it. I'm actively learning how to build better systems, work with agents, and use AI more effectively. I believe it has the potential to fundamentally improve how we develop software.

But I also believe there's an important distinction between using AI to improve the quality and efficiency of our work and using AI as justification to continually increase how much work we expect people to handle.

AI should help us build better products, not simply produce more output at the expense of quality and the people behind it.

I'm genuinely curious how others are navigating this shift, especially those who have found ways to embrace AI while maintaining realistic expectations and healthy boundaries.

Are we using AI to improve the way we work, or are we just raising expectations of how much work we should be doing?

21 comments

Is AI Creating Unrealistic Expectations?