Summarizer

I’m a remote work from home employee who never ever works overtime. I do use Claude code for my personal projects and ping at them from coffee shops and micro moments during my free time. It’s possible to engineer your own life boundaries and not be a victim of every negative trend in existence.

You can do it on a personal level, but when everyone else is overworking you, your manager will compare your output based on your peers, and based on it, you might be negatively impacted

Yeah absolutely. It’s hardly things like Claude Code that are the problem, Slack (or other forms of communication) are much easier to slip into personal time and have been a trend since Blackberries were invented.

This is always the reason I'm interested in this exact workflow. Want to build something but never have the time without sacrificing significant amounts of sleep but now it's easier than ever to get things building.

But what are you negotiating about? What do all tech workers have in common that wouldn't be better addressed with top level regulations like "right to disconnect"?

- maternity leave - paternity leave - overtime - not having to answer a call or email outside of work hours - workman’s comp / short/long-term disability for issues with my back or wrists or eyes or… - about 100 more things

All those sorts of protections seem like they make sense for every worker rather than being "tech" specific. I do understand that collective bargaining could help with carving out sector-specific deals, though. I wonder if there is a difference in context that explains why we might disagree. I'm in Australia where I think it's politically easier to "add" broad top level protections for all workers than it would be in the US.

The answer is boundaries If I get emails outside of work hours and they're not urgent - I reply during work hours. This is no different Burnt out workers are far less productive so win-win for everyone

Hum, I already have a phone with Slack / Email on. And it's only switched on during work hours. No messaging outside of that window. Why would that be different?

Are you suggesting that workers are NOT already more constantly "on the clock" with mobile phones/email/slack/text than before those things? (I'm not really sure LLMs will make it that much worse here, but all those things have been harmful to workers already.)

Had the same feeling many moons ago when they gave me an office smartphone where email from the company was available 24/7. At the beginning was answering emails at midnight, nowadays couldn't care less. Just wait until work hours. You'll likely get used to this new thing too.

That reminds me of my father calling the mobile phone and laptop issued to him as the "dunce kit", so he could work at home as well. He used to say that since the 90s, ahaha.

You can just say no.

Move somewhere with strong worker rights/laws even if you are not in a union. Here no with a normal job (not freelancers / contractors etc) is looking at their work phone/email outside 9-5/4-5 days a week; this frustrates US companies who merge/acquire companies here greatly but they cannot do much (firing for no cause is very expensive) except slowly move the operation to the US and wind down here, which is expected; everyone is already looking for new jobs as no one wants the 'performance reviews' with the broken records like 'you are not a teamplayer because your colleague was trying to reach you at 22:00 Friday night'.

This is a bit too "plugged in" for my liking. If I am in line for coffee, it's usually respite away from work, not an opportunity to do more. However, I do love the tmux + worktree + claude setup. I use this now and I know a few peers who do too and it's very enabling. This is what work feels like these days: cycling through agents, each working on a task, checking their work, unblocking them.

Also on the topic of gaps... liminal space IS precious. It doesn't require coding per se though. You can problem solve, jolt down a solution THEN only implement it as code later on. What matters IMHO is that the potential solution is not lost, wherever you might be. For that... I have shower crayons. Point is, CAPTURE ideas, don't necessarily implement on the spot but of course if you want to, it's good to be able to.

I currently use Hapi ( https://github.com/tiann/hapi/ ) for this and find it quite handy. I can easily tap into a session on my PC from my phone. Before that I used Happy ( https://happy.engineering/ ) which is also open source and a lot more sophisticated. It has a voice assistant that can chat with Claude Code on your behalf in the mobile app. However, it wasn't very reliable, and there are other reasons to use Hapi instead (documented in the Hapi repo). Before that, Omnara ( https://www.omnara.com/ ) a YC company and seemingly a proprietary Happy fork (?) but it never worked properly for me. Long story short, there are a few of the around, and frankly I really like to use them. Unlike other commenters, I don't find that they wreck my work-life balance. Rather, I can go out and have a walk in the park, only checking in on long-running tasks every once in a while. The diff view is pretty good too. There are many tasks where I'd rather not stare at my PC all day and instead do other things, and these tools allow me to do that.

>Development fits into the gaps of the day instead of requiring dedicated desk time. I find myself planning and jotting down things into a notebook while juggling adult/parent responsibilities. On little longer gaps I research. Then when the occasional longer gap happens I'm ready to start cracking on my desktop. I've been only dabbling with AI but have found that writing prompts by hand in the notebook and using the desk time to execute them works well. This also keeps me in the free tier.