This is my frustration at my current job. There's so much silliness and no one cares about avoiding it.
A less experienced dev suggested using "AI magic" to replace a URL validator. I protested, suggesting a cached fuzzy match solution (prepopulated by AI)... and no one cared. Now the AI model has been suddenly turned down, and our system is broken. We're going to have re-validate the whole system.
A younger developer who got promoted over me tried to write a doc on possible ways to fix it. He said "hey Dan, can you help me with this?" He got promoted over me because the way to get ahead is to write docs and have meetings, not do things sensibly. Now he's trying to use my work to demonstrate his leadership.
No one cares. The more I offer better solutions, the more it's a threat to less experienced developers. Things mostly work so my manager doesn't care. There's probably better ways for me to have handled things, but it's so exhausting fighting the nonsense and I just want to write good code.
I feel you. Similar experience on my side. I think it might've been like this before, but AI coding tools made it worse. Everybody thinks they can do it better - when there is a problem, the coding agent can just fix it. Why bother building relationships with senior devs or with anybody?
Looking deeper into it: these people don't understand the underlying foundations anymore. Just keep building fast, without building proper mental models (that would take time).
You need to advocate for yourself, because nobody else will, unless your manager is really good at his job.
Our work is largely very difficult to understand to outsiders, we need to write docs and have meetings to show what we have done. It's part of the job, and yes, if you don't do that, it doesn't matter how fantastic the software is that you wrote (sadly).
you've healed me - resonates