Were you chasing the feeling of successfully solving a problem? Have you replaced problem solving with LLM chats?

Maybe instead of engineering, you’ve been subtly shifted into project management and hate that career.

But it’s tough to engineer much these days. Instead I find I’m PM’ing the bots more than solving problems.

The culture of the tech industry started going to shit in 2022/2023 after rates were hiked and before LLMs were capable of anything much.

There's more toxicity, more waterfall, more authoritarianism, less autonomy, more pressure. Consequently lower productivity, too.

Sometimes AI is just the label that gets slapped on "all the ways the tech industry has changed over the last 3 years".