I tried to nod a bit to the inconsistency. Some projects clearly lost patience with imperfect contributions long ago. But many were still pretty supportive.

This dynamic also plays out in many companies. I see a lot of posts from mid to sr engineers frustrated with plummeting code quality and unsure how to manage the reviews. They are increasingly pulling away from the idea that they should mentor people to do better.

> They are increasingly pulling away from the idea that they should mentor people to do better.

Two considerations on this:

1. In the USA, it is common to switch jobs often (in opposite to, for example, Germany). So, in the US-American system it is not often worth the effort to invest a lot of mentoring ressources into some employee if he will leave soon anyway.

2. I personally observe that I often do try to give less experienced programmers good hints on how to improve, but my kind of thinking about programming is often so different that my advice is often of no use for them. Or I often get the arrogant reaction by less experienced programmers that I care far too much about obscure details. I thus seriously do believe that the only way to help junior programmers to become better is to completely crush their ego and arrogance (just like a doctoral study programme in, say, mathematics does to the doctoral students), which is of course not allowed at work. :-(

The correct response to irresponsible AI use in the workplace is maintaining standards and rejecting poor quality. Performance improvement plans as a fair warning followed by firing people works for incompetence or laziness, AI doesn’t change anything.

I’ll admit I’ve seen a spike in negative performance reviews but this is the new normal people will adapt.