Steve Yegge Urges Capping Engineers' Coding Time

Steve Yegge, a former Amazon and Google engineer, said in a recent episode of The Pragmatic Engineer newsletter/podcast that companies should cap the time an engineer spends coding at three hours per day to avoid AI-driven fatigue and burnout. He warned agentic AI creates a "vampiric effect" that boosts short-term output but risks long-term workforce exhaustion, urging leaders to accept reduced deep-work windows.