October 8, 2026
AI hasn't freed developers from routine work: Sam Newman on task switching
Sam Newman, author of books on microservices, believes developers work more and switch between tasks more often with AI.
Gergely Orosz
@gergelyorosz
I sometimes wonder too: why am I working more with AI tools, rather than less? Here's what @samnewman says: “AI was supposed to free us from routine work. For most developers, that hasn't happened: we're doing more work and switching between tasks more often.”
The Pragmatic Engineer @Pragmatic_Eng
"I've seen a few people talking about pairing with their AI assistant. It's not a human. Stop pretending it is. And so you're all going off, you're doing more in a different direction. That shared mental model of the program is breaking down. AI was supposed to free us from drudgery. It isn't for most software developers because we're doing more work, we've got more context switching, we're losing that big picture." - @samnewman, Author of Building Microservices & Building Resilient Distributed Systems
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Sam Newman, author of books on microservices, believes developers work more and switch between tasks more often with AI.
Gergely Orosz also finds that he works more with AI tools, rather than less.