> And there's such little empathy out there for anyone going through it like me. AI is here now loser, keep up, get on board or get replaced.

I think that this really needs to be internalized by a lot of people. I really appreciated when my boss sat our team down and said "Yeah this is the new normal, and I know its not what you signed up for. Its fine to feel sad that your job is changing in such a dramatic way." No, it didn't help anyone actually adjust, but sometimes you just need someone to empathize and tell you its OK to feel bad about this when everyone around you is excited.

> If you read this far thanks. And if anyone has any advice for me, how to go from "thinking through problems by coding your way through them" to "doing the thinking upfront" then really, I'm all ears.

I'm trying to replace it with "thinking through with AI" to limited success. A lot of people recommend having the AI "plan" the thing and review the plan, which is OK. I've also had it do a prototype and poked around a bit, summarized the learnings, and then did it again in an iterative manner without rough edges I've found. Whether you are given the space to do that is up to your org -- its hard sell to "do it again" but I've found that the second attempt leads to better results since I can prompt my way around the problems. Sometimes this also leads to a "Not even wrong" moment where I found out that I framed the problem wrong and the AI dutifully carried out doing the wrong thing.