“even though you're delivering code at a good pace, you're taking too long to deliver those Design Docs. Are you using AI? You should use more AI.”

This here is the crux of it I think… it’s often promoted that AI will give us the time to do the “real” engineering work of designing systems and really serving the user, but in practice all I’ve seen is further attempts at optimizing every last process with AI - just homogenizing every product and feature into slop.

It feels like every leader has been to some talking points boot camp where they’re incentivized to apply pressure to every part of their process - sort of a desperate attempt to justify the costs they’re incurring. I think we will look back at this and see how obviously short sighted it was.