I don't know your full situation, but as someone who has gone through full-blown real burnout: it's not worth it. In this economic situation, we do need to grind to keep our jobs but if you're getting close to burn-out I would *strongly* advise prioritizing avoiding burnout.

I went from being a passionate programmer spending all my free time working on code, to be unable to write a single line for even my most loved personal projects for 6 months. Fully awake, in the middle of the day, I would boot up my computer and within 10 minutes my body would put itself to sleep. I'd wake up hours later with my laptop barely past the login screen. It took me 6 months before I could do personal projects again. 1 year before I could do professional work again. 2 years before I could juggle both. I've fully recovered (or at least I did right before LLMs hit the scene), but it takes a lot of time and I lost a lot of money not working for that year. If I could go back in time, I would have quit that job earlier because it is far easier finding jobs as a passionate developer rather than a recovering burnout.

"Gathering mental capacity to simply know what next I need to do" is not a waste. That is work. In fact it is the most important work with LLMs. If you spend all day in a hammock dreaming up what next needs to be done (and it's the right stuff), and then type a few sentences into the LLM to generate it overnight, that is better time spent working than spending all day cranking out 20 PRs that are of mid-low value.

That sucks.

Do they know they are, essentially, expending you?

It seems like your boss is doing work that doesn’t actually add value without you to review the code. But maybe the company isn’t set up to fairly evaluate the fact that review provides more value than creating code, with a workflow like your boss’s?

I think the fun part of stuff you could do is setting up dev environments that are augmented. Not only the code creation part. But also the reviewing, testing , quality benchmarking and more. Arranging this is not easy and definitely an engineering challenge.

Maybe this will provide some historical context. Capitalist automation is an anti-worker, anti-union ideology even though in theory automation is a good thing. When automation is used to reclaim time for workers or to increase pay, it is a good thing. When it is used to dispossess people or enforce work speedups, it is anti-worker.

https://jacobin.com/2023/03/automation-union-busting-product...