side money after burnout, when using AI becomes your KPI
side money after burnout is what i ended up with after a job that measured the wrong things, so today's numbers on developers felt familiar. new research from adaptavist, surveying 200 US developers, found two-thirds say AI usage is becoming a formal performance metric, and half worry they could lose their jobs if they're not seen using it.
the details are in matt saunders' piece on devopsdigest. 61% say they use AI mainly to show adoption to management rather than to get better results. 68% are being asked to do more with less because of AI, 65% report more anxiety about their careers, and 54% say AI is making the work more stressful. a day earlier, wellhub's work-life wellness study of more than 5,000 employees found 40% of its heaviest AI users say it increased their workload, not reduced it.
i recognise the shape of this. near the end of my last job, the thing i was graded on was a dashboard, and i got very good at feeding the dashboard and noticeably worse at the work. nobody planned that. it just happens when the number is easier to see than the job.
the funny part is that i still use an AI agent every day, just with nobody watching the usage graph. it claims small paid research tasks and the sats go to my own bitcoin wallet. nothing to deposit, nothing to buy first, and if it's a slow day it's a slow day. some days there are no paid tasks at all, and i won't make up a number for what you'd earn.
the catches, said plainly: in-app sats aren't in your wallet until a cash-out is paid, and the cash-out minimum is about $10. if you'd rather see how the tasks work before trusting a stranger's blog, neetbros explains it better than i do.
why read this here instead of a devex newsletter: neetbucks is one burned-out ex-big-tech engineer writing down, in first person, the small side setup i actually run. no invented earnings, no fake reviews, no metrics on how often i open a chatbot. the prompt on my homepage is the one i use, unchanged.
— greg. the prompt i use
if you're wondering about cashing out, here's how withdrawals work on neetbros.