“AI is killing remote work,” said Sahil Lavangia, founder of Gumroad. Citing Claude 3.5 Sonnet, he said that software that once took days to ship can now be delivered in hours or minutes, enabling people to work 10-20 times faster than before.
Lavingia further said that AI-accelerated speedups in software and content creation have made it challenging for remote work to keep pace. However, he argued that even brief communication delays have become bottlenecks in AI-accelerated workflows.
He explained that in-office teams can more effectively use AI’s rapid capabilities by collaborating in real time, using instant feedback for experimentation, problem-solving, and decision-making. This immediacy, he suggested, is harder to achieve remotely, where asynchronous delays slow potential productivity gains.
“With AI handling much of the execution work—writing code, generating content, creating designs—the main bottlenecks are now cognitive: getting stuck on problems, running low on energy, or struggling to generate fresh ideas,” he said.
On a similar note, AWS chief Matt Garman, recently made a decision to implement a strict five-day, in-office mandate for employees starting next year. He stressed the importance of in-person collaboration for driving “innovation” and “speed of execution.”
He added that spontaneous hallway conversations and quick brainstorming sessions at whiteboards provide unique advantages in physical office spaces. “Particularly as we think about how we want to disrupt and invent on behalf of our customers, we find there is no substitution for doing that in person,” he said, adding that face-to-face interactions boost creative energy and speed.
Makes sense. Recently, Google chief Sundar Pichai revealed during the company’s recent earnings call that 25% of Google’s new code is generated by AI. This leads us to the question of what the role of software engineers will be.
“People wanted remote jobs and then got replaced by global talent that works twice as hard at half the cost. And now AI is also coming for those jobs,” said Neel Parekh, founder and CEO of MaidThis.
Interestingly, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently said that Google was falling behind in the AI race due to its remote work policies. “Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning,” he said. He suggested that startups like OpenAI and Anthropic were succeeding because their employees “work like hell.”
During the GitHub Universe 2024, Thomas Dohmke also expressed a similar sentiment, saying that developers are now using AI to build AI. “Developers have embraced AI faster than any sector of the global workforce,” he said.
However, not everyone agrees. “Remote work isn’t about coding cheaply. With remote work, you can hire high-IQ individuals who would be impossible to recruit in NYC physically,” said Catagay Kurt, founder of an AI startup based in Los Angeles.
Remote Work Kills Creativity?
Last year, at a session organised by fintech company Stripe, OpenAI chief Sam Altman also said that remote work was a mistake. “I think definitely one of the tech industry’s worst mistakes in a long time was that everybody could go full remote forever, and startups didn’t need to be together in person, and there was going to be no loss of creativity,” he said.
He added that the remote work experiment is over, and technology isn’t yet advanced enough for people to work fully remote indefinitely, especially in startups.
On the contrary, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston recently shared in an interview that he sees remote work becoming the standard. He said that currently, 90 percent of Dropbox’s 2,600 employees work remotely.
However, he also believes that while remote work offers great flexibility, there’s no substitute for meeting in person. “If you want to build relationships with people and build trust, which is super important. You can sustain relationships on Zoom, you can’t build relationships on Zoom,” he said.
AI at Works
Speaking at Cypher 2024, Mohandas Pai, head of Aarin Capital and former CFO of Infosys said that repetitive and rule-based jobs are going to disappear as AI can perform them easily.
However, he added that creative jobs, where higher-order thinking skills are required, are not going away. “The highly creative jobs are not going to go away. People who are very well educated, very well informed, and specialists—their jobs are not going to disappear,” he said.
Vinod Khosla, in his latest blog post, suggested that with AI, the idea of a three-day work week could soon become a reality. “With the right policies, we could smoothen the transition and even usher in a three-day workweek,” wrote Khosla, underlining how AI will fundamentally transform the way we work, albeit in a way that positively impacts all of humankind and the economy at large.
Previously, Reid Hoffman, co-founder and executive chairman at LinkedIn, predicted that the traditional 9-to-5 job would disappear by 2034. He is bullish on the gig economy revolution, where 50% of the population will become freelancers and earn more while working for “3 or 4 gigs”, than those in traditional employment.
Going a step ahead, Tesla chief Elon Musk suggests that AI will completely eliminate all jobs. “If you want to do a job that’s kinda like a hobby, you can do a job. But otherwise, AI and the robots will provide any goods and services that you want,” he said at a conference earlier this year.
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