I quit last September and have been doing sporadic freelancing and intensely working on personal projects.

It was already clear to me last summer that the agentic stuff was kind of the final nail in the coffin of a "normal" software dev shop. All the routine of typical SCRUM-based etc activity was degrading even further from ritual and theater into a pointless charade or comedy, or as you say, absurdity. Dueling LLMs on the code reviews, people sitting around a conference room on laptops counting fantasy story points, getting Claude to write their annual self-assessments.

Unfortunately I still need to make money. I've done a couple freelance gigs. Some is less absurd than others. I'm sporadically interviewing to go full time again but I'm being extremely picky.

I quit last August for similar reasons, and lest everyone here think it's all amazing ICs vs. clueless managers, I was at the director level of a midsize company caught between the developers I deeply cared for and agentic madness pushed from the executives and my boss the CTO. I'm likely older than many here, but still too poor / young to retire and maybe it was a mistake, but I kind of feel like I didn't have a choice. I've made big contrarian (stupid?) moves before and they've worked out, so we'll see what's next. Over the past 11 months I've explored and worked with AI my way, and ridden a lot of bicycle.