Is This Sustainable?

This article offers a frank, three-year retrospective from a senior engineer working in an organization deeply integrated with AI. Unlike typical pieces focused on productivity gains or architectural shifts, it delves into the lived reality of how AI impacts senior roles and organizational dynamics, highlighting both benefits and unexpected, unsustainable costs.

• The author notes a significant collapse in the time from idea to demo, allowing for rapid prototyping and bypassing traditional proposal-writing. This speed, however, shifts the bottleneck from engineering to organizational alignment, making cohesion harder to achieve as multiple teams quickly build disparate solutions.
• Senior engineering roles have paradoxically become more hands-on, requiring more coding and strategic writing simultaneously. This expanded scope comes at the expense of human-focused work like mentoring and dedicated thinking time, as organizational expectations absorb productivity gains into increased output volume.
• Specializing in rapidly evolving GenAI tools offers career advantages but carries the risk of perishable depth, as specific knowledge quickly becomes obsolete. The author bets on the enduring value of organizational change experience over tool-specific expertise.
• The scope of developer experience (DX) has expanded dramatically, driven not by better advocacy but by AI agents magnifying existing platform weaknesses. This new "agent experience" elevates DX to board-level prioritization, but also brings challenges in measuring impact and sharing credit for org-wide initiatives.

Ultimately, the author concludes that the current pace is unsustainable. While personally motivated by impact and learning, the volume of demanded output is growing faster than AI's ability to deliver, with the gap filled by increased hours and the sacrifice of essential, non-technical aspects of the role. This pattern, it's suggested, will likely propagate to other engineering levels.