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There's a lot to unpack here, and the TLDR is that his comment is one huge doompost, and your comment is one large concern troll. I'm engaging with it anyway, not because you'll read this, but someone else may.

First, the guy above us has basically suffered a depressive episode. "Might as well give the kids an A" and "the ship has sailed" and "no one will write software anymore." These are defeatist attitudes. Maybe the guy just needs a place to vent his frustrations and doesn't have anyone close to him. But in my opinion, sharing these thoughts out loud sets a bad example both as a senior engineer and as a role model for children and students of any kind. It's giving up, it's quitting, and it's demoralizing. I believe he should have kept that to himself, unless this was a cry for help, in which case this is all the help I can provide and the only way I know how.

Second, the person I'm replying to leveled a lot of logical fallacies, real "Flood The Zone With Shit" shit. We got to start with the Appeal To Authority. Tenure is not the mark of an effective leader, but it's all they can offer. 25 and 30 year engineers also puts them at about 55 to 65 years old, nearing retirement. They are not invested in the future of the industry, they are on the cusp of leaving it behind. So even if they were who they say they were, why should I believe them?

We also have a lot of Strawmen. "Downvoters have never used an AI before," has the same energy as "Cryptocurrency haters have never minted an NFT before," implying that AI resistance is founded on ignorance. "He's just telling the truth," is also really sneaky, because it primes us to take it at face value as fact. But it's just like, an opinion maaan. "We'd be throwing away a massive productivity boost" is just straight up propaganda, may as well have just copy pasted Sam Altman for that one.

So now here's from my experience. If you're willing to take my word for it, I'm a 10-year engineer who's been using Opus and Fable at work. Here's how AI changed our company:

• Productivity is not up, we are still beholden to clients who demand time to preview the releases. Management has forced us to cram more features into a given release, causing the clients to delay so they can reevaluate it. End result, we ship fewer features in a given month, not more.
• Despite all this extra work being done, we still are working 40 plus hours a week.
• Team morale is way down, as everyone believes that the only reason we're using it this much is because management wants to lay people off.
• Engineers are starting to snap at each other for trying to ask questions about new features, and the new favorite catch phrase of all is "I don't know, have you asked Claude?"
• 32,000 line merge requests are now the norm. The bulk of that is unit tests that failed to account for basic UX: is it "nice" to use the software? These code reviews will inevitably let some large vulnerability through, so most code reviewers are taking longer to review so that they don't get the blame.
• Engineers are getting lazier writing their skill files and prompts, leading to increased churn. They're using AI to write the skills that AI will ingest, leading to generational decay.
• I now have to scrutinize the output of engineers that I used to value and respect, and after multiple iterations of code reviews with them, they begin to take it personally. This destroys our team cohesion and camaraderie.
• Engineers are burning through their token allotments so fast that they are now twiddling their thumbs for an entire sprint until it can replenish. Management cannot decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing and are now so confused that they are hitting people with the carrot.

So... I said it before and I'll say it again. THIS is the trillion dollar technology? It makes a bunch of people more tired, more angry, more scared, and more alone.