I also work at a huge company, and this observation is true. The way AI is being rammed down our throats is burning out the best engineers. OTOH, the mediocre simian army “empowered” by AI is pushing slop like there’s no tomorrow. The expectation from leadership, who tried Claude for a single evening, is that you should be able to deliver everything yesterday.

The resilience of the system has taken a massive hit, and we were told that it doesn’t matter. Managers, designers, and product folks are being asked to make PRs. When things cause Sev0 or Sev1 incidents, engineers are being held responsible. It’s a huge clown show.

True at Doordash, Amazon, and salesforce - speaking from experience.

I have always enjoyed the feeling of aporia during coding. Learning to embrace the confusion and the eventual frustration is part of the job. So I don’t mind running in a loop alongside an agent.

But I absolutely loathe reviewing these generated PRs - more so when I know the submitter themselves has barely looked at the code. Now corporate has mandated AI usage and is asking people to do 10k LOC PRs every day. Reviewing this junk has become exhausting.

I don’t want to read your code if you haven’t bothered to read it yourselves. My stance is: reviewing this junk is far more exhausting. Coding is actually the fun part.

I still see people doing "you are a world class distributed systems engineer" think. Never fails me to chuckle.

Shhh...you're only supposed to unilaterally praise it to get along with your clueless leadership.