I currently work at one of the biggest tech companies. I’ve been doing this for over 20 years, and I’ve worked at scrappy startups, unicorns, and medium size companies.

I’ve certainly seen my share of what I call slot driven development where a developer just throws things at the wall until something mostly works. And plenty if cut and paste development.

But it’s far from the majority. It’s usually the same few developers at a company doing it, while the people who know what they’re doing furiously work to keep things from falling apart.

If the majority of devs were doing this nothing would work. My worry is that AI lets the bad devs produce this kind of work on a massive scale that overwhelms the good devs ability to fight back or to even comprehend the system.

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.

Tech companies. How about massive non software tech companies. I don't know where it is not the norm and I have been in very many of them as supplier for the past 30 years. Tech companies are a bit different as they usually have leadership that prioritizes these things.