> When I returned from five months of paternity leave in early 2024, the org needed someone at my level to lead GenAI work in developer experience and I was the available person. It wasn't a bet so much as an opportunity I recognised when it showed up. I took enough time to satisfy myself that this wave was different from previous hype cycles before I committed, but once I did, I had to drop most of the rest of my work on developer experience to make space for it. For a while I was the only engineer at any seniority dedicated to this, and the depth I built up happened by necessity as much as by design.

Followed by....

> Senior engineers in AI-forward orgs are doing more leveraged, more hands-on, more meeting-heavy work simultaneously, with the human-focused parts of the role paying for it. The build cost collapsed, the alignment cost rose, the thinking time disappeared, and the productivity gains got captured by output volume rather than output quality. I

What is the job of a senior/lead engineer if not to take the uninformed hype chasing of the senior business, and deploy it in a way that makes things better?

I can't help but feel this senior engineer is talking far too casually about how - under their watch as senior AI engineer chap - engineers spend more time on throwaway code, have less personal development/1-to-1s, and didn't improve code quality. They haven't even mentioned the added financial token cost.

The only thing standing in the way of greedy hype chasing CEOs and a post apocolyptic wasteland is engineers taking their crazy requests and not making the world worse, and it sounds like the author has failed here. I think it's very positive and frank to share their experience, but I'm surprised they don't seem to see their role in it.