> People worry that not being seen as mindless, uncritical AI cheerleaders will be a career-limiting move in the current environment of enforced conformity with

> People worry that not being seen as mindless, uncritical AI cheerleaders will be a career-limiting move in the current environment of enforced conformity within tech Yes. I am seeing this right now, but it's not just enough to join the chanting around the altar, you've got to be seen enthusiastically using AI as much as possible and it's turned the contributions of some of the most productive high level developers in my company into... ...well, slop. I'm dealing with a bug from one such right now, where they wrote code that used my library, and it's not working for them, and they lack the understanding of their code to fix it, and the reason it's a bug I'm working on? Cursor couldn't fix it for them, and they lack the mental model to do so, because it's hard to mentally model code you didn't write. I'm sure there's an inevitable "well, your company/colleague is doing it wrong then" critique incoming. And I agree. But given that "doing it right" is often being defined as "using it as much as possible" by business leaders across the industry, then we get these paradoxical outcomes where doing so reduces productivity, but no-one is ready to admit that. You've got to be AI-first, or AI-native, at least if you want the investors to stay invested. I've never experienced such a collective adherence to tech hype (but probably only because my company couldn't figure out how to jam a blockchain and/or NFT in previously). Not even during the days when everyone was serverless, or "cloud-first" / "cloud-native". It's wild. TL;DR - we've always as an industry used appropriate tools for appropriate problems, right now it feels like so many of us are throwing AI slop at walls and seeing what sticks.