Garry Tan, president of Y Combinator, recently boasted of staying up 19 consecutive hours using Claude Code. That detail — an accelerator chief treating sleep deprivation as a productivity flex — sits at the center of a Guardian investigation into San Francisco's AI startup scene, published in February 2026 by reporter Arielle Pardes. She found engineers working 12 to 16 hours a day, seven days a week, in conditions one unnamed employee called worse than China's notorious "996" regime.
The grind has a specific texture. Sanju Lokuhitige, CTO and co-founder of Mythril, a pre-seed AI startup backed by Maple VC, told the Guardian he works every day of the week with no work-life balance. What drives it isn't just competition — it's the particular anxiety of <a href="/news/2026-03-14-codespeak-wants-to-replace-code-with-markdown-specs">building tools that may eliminate the builders</a>. Kyle Finken, a software engineer at developer documentation platform Mintlify, put it plainly: "Am I going to have a job in three years?"
The fear has a basis. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has predicted AI could eliminate roughly half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have each forecast AI replacing junior and mid-level engineers at their companies. Tech firms collectively laid off approximately 250,000 workers globally in 2025, frequently citing AI as a factor.
Executive coach Mike Robbins, whose clients include Google, Microsoft, Airbnb, and Salesforce, told the Guardian that corporate demand for his work on employee burnout and wellbeing has effectively dried up. Companies now want guidance on "change, disruption and uncertainty" — a shift that tracks with employers' diminished concern about retaining workers as AI compresses the productivity gap between senior and junior roles. The IMF and Stanford University provide broader economic framing in the piece. What's concentrated in San Francisco's startups right now, the article argues, is headed for every desk that runs on knowledge work.