> My friend's panel raised a point I keep coming back to: if we sprint to deliver something, the expectation becomes to keep sprinting. Always. Tired engineers miss edge cases, skip tests, ship bugs. More incidents, more pressure, more sprinting. It feeds itself.

Sorry but this is the whole point of software engineering in a company. The aim is to deliver value to customers at a consistent pace.

If a team cannot manage their own burnout or expectations with their stakeholders then this is a weak team.

It has nothing to do with using ai to make you go faster. Ai does not cause this at all.