Rings true because now teams end up building a lot of things that may or may not have alignment to customer/business needs.

The slow part has always been figuring out exactly what the customer/business actually needs, not the coding. Now teams are throwing money at tokens without solving the "who's buying this?" part appropriately and end up just building excess.

All judgement seems to have gone out the window.

At my last job, within our org, the director had 3 staff engineers building the same, but competing AI tool.

At the last all hands other teams announced their own similar AI engineer productivity tools.

I low-key regret now sticking around long enough to get a layoff package.

This rings a bell.

Now that you can just throw tokens at it, it seems like actually thinking about what is useful and productive is no longer a practical skill (it still is, just no one in leadership nor product wants to practice discipline any more).

I don't know what to say about it except that it legitimately feels like some folks have just shut off their inquisitiveness and willingness to investigate and think before acting.

Now it's act, waste tokens and time, only to learn that the result of the action was obviously bad from the start because of some real-world human nature that we now no longer stop to try to understand first before applying a technical solution.

I suppose you meant 'not' not 'now' yeah?

yeah, my bad. I typo'd on purpose to prove I'm not AI :P :'(