Just anecdotally, I recognize and dread working with AI code nowadays. In the past when I see something stupid being done, my thought was "I wonder if there's a good reason they did it this way" but now it's increasingly "I wonder what other AI written problems are in this module".

Being forced to use AI would be a nightmare, as it means I would have to turn that same distrust onto my own code. It's one thing to use AI to basically just customize a scaffold like people do when using it to bootstrap some Next.js website or something. It's a completely different matter to have it writing code in huge and data driven existing codebases.

Management should not be telling dev the tools to use. Tell me why I'm wrong.

Couldn't agree more, but when the company is paying big money for a tool you can bet they're going to make sure people are using it

Is that the RTO mandates because we have so many unused 5 year office leases?

I see, it's part deux.

"We made a poor investment and now we're making it our employees problem" is absolutely a common outcome from business leaders yeah

The only thing that trickles down is bullshit unfortunately

I mean, ideally, management should not be telling me anything and should let me do my job in splendid, peaceful isolation. In practice, however, management tells me how to do all sorts of things, all the time, and they're responsible for me continuing to get paid, so I have to listen.

You're also responsible if they get paid so if the product sinks it's game over. So they have to listen too.

This pattern is maybe 20% about AI specifically and 80% about low-trust leadership.

YC has a big role to play in this mess. Gary Tan really needs to step down. This is what happens when you put a non hacker in charge of building tech.