As a senior developer, my most productive days are genuinely when I remove a lot of code. This might seem like negative productivity to a naive beancounter, but in fact this is my peak contribution to the software and the organization. Simplifying, optimizing, identifying what code is no longer needed, removing technical debt, improving maintainability, this is what requires most of my experience and skill and contextual knowledge to do safely and correctly. AI has no ability to do this in any meaningful way, and code bases filled with mostly AI generated code are bound to become an unmaintainable nightmare (which I will eventually be paid handsomely to fix, I suspect)

A lot of bosses think developers’ entire job is just churning out code when it’s actually like 50% coding and 50% listening to stakeholders, planning, collaborating with designers, etc.

A lot of leadership is incompetent. In a reasonable, just, world they would not be in these decision making positions.

Verbose blogger Ed Zitron wrote about this. He called them "Business Idiots": https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

And if you “write” me an email using Chat GPT and I just read a summary, what is the fucking point?

Fuuuck, this infuriates me. I wrote that shit for a reason. People already don't read shit before replying to it and this is making it so much worse.

I was a frontend developer and UI/UX designer that specialized in JavaScript and Typescript with emphasis on React. I'm learning Python for Flask. I'm skipping meals so I can afford Udemy courses then AWS certifications. I don't enjoy any of this and I'm falling apart.

So some places started forcing developers to use AI with a quota and monitor the usage. Of course the devs don't go checking each AI generated line for correctness. That's bad for the quota. It's guaranteed to add more slop to the codebase.

It helps with translating. My job is basically double-checking the translation quality and people are essentially paying me for my assurance. Of course, I take responsibility for any mistakes.

Microsoft did the June layoffs we knew were coming since January and pinned it on "AI cost savings" so that doing so would raise their stock price instead of lower it.

Doesn't that have more to do with Gamepass eating game studios' lunch though? And a lot less with AI? Just regular ol' dumbass management decisions.

So conversely, we'll need more workers now that generative AI is hindering productivity.

Absolutely. I should have used the term productivity rather than service. Lack of caffeine had blunted my vocabulary. In essence: more output for less work. Output in this case is profit.

Enshitification is, in essence, the push beyond diminishing returns into the 'lossy' space ... sacrificing a for b. The end result is an increasingly shitty experience.