> I think it's ultimately about finding the organization that fits the workflow you want.

This is a key point, and one that is rarely articulated.

The problem -- for me, anyway -- with the Current Era is specifically the workload, but the relentlessness.

I'm old enough to remember the Old Days of big release dates. You'd grind for a while, sometimes in a deathmarch, but after the release the organization would relax and there would be _some_ slack.

Now it's an endless river of prompts, push to prod, fix, repeat ad nauseam. Because implementation is now much cheaper but genuinely good ideas are as scarce as ever, companies are turning into a random walk optimizations weirdly mirroring training regimes. The idea apparently being that you make enough features/changes you'll eventually find the key to unlocking hyper-growth.

But unlike a training system, all these intermediate steps compound. Customers find their software mutating under them at an alarming rate. Maintainability becomes barely possible, even with Claude doing a ton of work. We're just creating technical debt we expect the future AI to fix, and getting no closer to the "revenue unlock."

Many are chained with fear to this dehumanizing and demoralizing system, and it sucks.

I'm a programmer with about 7 years of experience in programming work. I appreciate hearing this from someone with far more experience than I have. senior sir.(In Korea, the word senior is sometimes referred to as one of the positions, but it is also used as a respected adult.

I also think it's about the workload. A senior from my country (Korea) once told me something similar. He had 25 years of programming experience. He said to me:

'Back in the day, inefficiencies reduced the workload. People weren't used to email, or getting approvals took a day or two. Those inefficiencies actually meant people worked less. These days, there's just too much work.'

Hearing your words reminded me of what that senior programmer who hired me said.

It's true—once you start using AI code, it becomes hard to write your own code. Because the machine's abstraction and your abstraction are different. So there are points where maintainability becomes harder.

It feels like we're chasing efficiency so much that the resting points humans actually need are disappearing.

Anyway, I agree with you, senior.