See you, toil!
In another life, I wanted to become a civil servant. The selection process required passing a demanding set of exams, the first of which was a multiple-choice test.
When preparing for that exam, I spent most of my study time building a system that converted practice exam PDFs into interactive web forms so I could train more effectively. I barely passed that first test. Studying the actual shit would have been a much better use of my time. The only thing I remember from those times is how much fun I had working on those scripts.
I hate toil. Tiring, tedious, repetitive work you have to do just because. Before the LLM revolution, knowing how to write code would make you feel like a superhuman for being able to get rid of some of it. Now, you realize you were only addressing a tiny fraction.
Just from this week, two examples:
First: Create a report analyzing options for summarizing certain conversations in very short sentences. Which models should I analyze? What are the cheap cloud options? And the promising local ones? What is the cost of each? How do they compare with each other?
It took me one frigging hour writing a first spec with what I wanted, refining it with Claude, then getting Claude to produce the report, for which it wrote a script. It would rely on Ollama for local models and OpenRouter for the cloud ones. Preparing such a report would have easily been one day of work or more. It took me one hour with an agent. Except for the initial request and for assessing the report, I consider all of it toil work I automated.
Second: I was investigating a very specific performance problem in the HEY MacOS app that could be related to an outdated Chromium and Electron harness. “Please Claude, update everything to the latest, and deal with all the things that will break.” Thirty minutes later, I had a branch with the update and a new build to try. I was not familiar with our Electron pipeline at all, nor was I particularly interested in spending my time fixing issues with Windows signing errors in our GitHub Actions build pipeline. That was toil work an agent could take care of much better, and it did!
The redefinition of toil is the most fascinating part. As a programmer, I would have considered that writing code was an essential part of what I did. The act of typing D-E-F-<TAB> to get a new method in Ruby… Toil! I still care a lot about the code I push, but typing it myself feels like stone age stuff now.
You can frame it as everyone will lose their jobs, or as imagine what humanity without toil can do.
I am certainly going with the latter!