I could “retire” to a senior level role and run at 10% capacity with zero AI use at a bigco and nobody would know the difference.

Yup. Everything after the first decade of a career is either jockeying for a promotion, jumping ship-to-ship as needed, or sitting around in meetings.

It's not that people get lazy or are underemployed, but that expertise is just that valuable. You'd think this would be proof enough to break the AI echo chamber already.