Engineer says coding agents raised his GitHub activity and workload
Original title: AI promised less work. I've never worked more
By October 27 he logged 2,102 contributions in 2026, already above every full year from 2021 to 2025.
A Bold.org engineering leader argues that coding agents did not shorten his week. Parallel agents create constant context switches, and cheaper coding led him to take on more work. Using his GitHub history from January 2019, he says 2026 is near his 2020 pace even though he now leads engineering and does less feature work. August 2026 was his busiest month in that timeline, with 427 contributions. He treats the counts as a rough activity signal, not a measure of value.
Unconfirmed: GitHub contribution counts mix commits, reviews and issues and are the author’s own reading of his history.
- 2020 was his prior high year at 2,711 contributions; 2023 was the low at 1,189.
- The median weekday rose to 7 contributions in 2026, from 3 or 4 in 2022–2025.
- He had 16 days with 24 or more contributions in 2026, versus one per year from 2022 to 2025.
- Public contributions in 2026 were 191, under a tenth of the year’s total.
From the original article
7 min read at oioannou.com
The pitch was that AI would give us our time back. Write less boilerplate, delegate the boring parts, go home earlier. I am not complaining about the tools.
By oorestisime · oioannou.com
A short excerpt; the article and its images belong to the publisher. Summary, key facts and assessment above are AI-written from the article and can be wrong.