> I could "retire" to a senior level role and have AI do 90% of my work and nobody would know the difference.

They would notice, and then they would fire 9/10 of the people in your role. If you are unlucky, you get laid off. If you are lucky, you get to botsit full time for the workload of 10 engineers for less pay and no career advancement.

This would last until they figure out how to remove the human from the loop entirely.

Nobody has noticed where I work. I'm thinking of getting a second job, actually.

Key factors for me:

  - Company is full of old school engineers who seem to hate AI and will scrutinize every command it runs.  Means that even though we're both 'using' AI, I'm still way more productive.
  - Said engineers have too much inside knowledge of the horrific system they made that management can't possibly get rid of them.  Helps that they're workers-rights minded too.
  - Company has enough revenue to keep up payroll indefinitely.

Now, does the AI write good code? Often not. But the codebase is already terrible, so it's no big difference.