Once I changed my goal from maximizing code quality to maximizing billable hours, I feel a lot more optimistic about the future and these AI tools are going to create so many opportunities for me.
I found it hard to compete with junior developers in my last job (before AI was mainstream) in terms of volume of code because some of them would write 1000 lines of low quality code per day... Now I can also do this. It gives me a lot of surplus energy to figure out how to play politics and shift blame... It gives me an actual competitive upper hand over the juniors. I can out-compete them both in meeting/debate and code/feature volume. I talk wisely and code foolishly. Win win. I couldn't do this before because I was writing the code myself and I had essentially lost the ability to write high volumes of dirty code. I had a kind of analysis paralysis due to trying to solve problems in an optimal, minimalist, most reliable way. No longer a problem. Bugs are a problem for someone else.
I have so much more time to think about career strategy now. I managed to avoid being assigned to any difficult projects... I feel bad for the other people who try to go above and beyond and end up wedging themselves into a difficult situation where the software is down all the time and they have to take the blame... The AI never gets the blame.
I hated playing politics before but AI has made playing politics a necessity. It's like the more apathetic you are about your output, the better off you are.
The ironic thing is that I know it's possible to produce high quality code with AI. I've had some really positive experiences with Claude Code on side projects... But that doesn't align with the reality of 99% of software projects. The foundation is not set up right to get these kinds of results. I could set up the foundation correctly but I'd have to be present in the project since the beginning and I'd have to be given a lot of decision power; but I never get such opportunities. Bad foundations beget bad code, especially with AI because the AI never gets the idea to refactor... If your codebase is unmaintainable, it will hallucinate dirty code which doesn't work. It keeps coming up with more and more hacks... Then it delivers hacks on top of its own hacks.