https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872
The end. No anger at you or your boss. It's an incompatibility.
I understand why some companies mandate usage these days. Especially for programming. The honest truth is that it does speed up development. The other honest truth is that there's resistance to change that harms productivity at times like this and the only way around that is for leadership to be very direct on this point.
To use a metaphor employers don't want weavers who refuse to make use of the loom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
it's funny to reference that, since the luddite movement was about working conditions, pay, and quality of goods produced. It wasn't ideological opposition to technology (They didn't destroy machines when acceptable conditions were agreed)
> To use a metaphor employers don't want weavers who refuse to make use of the loom.
The loom actually produced something, as opposed to mediocre coders who ingratiate themselves with management by pushing "AI" because they hate all productive people.
The loom also did not steal other people's IP.
I've been staff level at Meta and Google and many other companies in my career. I've been in the industry over 20 years now. I can talk to peers in the industry at that level and above and the sentiment is pretty universal. "This saves a lot of time, we need engineers to learn to use this asap". Such decisions are not coming from a vacuum. It's literally your most senior engineers advising management that leads to these mandates.
I am allowed to be angry at a person for their opinions or actions.
>Luddite metaphor
Metaphors are already a weak and oversimplifying rhetorical hammer, this one particularly so.
That is a highly controversial statement! It depends on what you’re working on, how you work, and so many other factors than just laying it out as just a fact is close to dishonest.
If I heard someone making a blanket mandate for using AI, I'd translate that to them hearing this "new AI thing" allows people to do more work more efficently, and they to see that increase in their org.
I'd take that mandate as a chance to explore AI on someone else's dime, but continue doing my work otherwise, only using AI as it benefits me.
If expectations rise to un-reasonable level because of unrealistic expectations around AI, that's a seperate problem you'll have to deal with.
(It's also not a great look that your leadership wouldn't dig in to realize how silly forced AI is, but a charitable reading is that they're trying to force interactions with AI so employees can discover where it works and where it doesn't)
The thing is, there is no going back. There will be no significant demand for output that's created by humans even though a machine can do it as well. You can try to find a niche where AI is worse than humans. But that will be increasingly difficult to find.
So if you want to continue doing things without AI, that's fine. But most likely it will be a hobby, not a job.
And a convenient excuse.
