Lead and senior dev/architect here - not forced to use AI, but I spend my PD (personal development) days and hackathons trying out all new things, as every good dev does, and anyone not trying out all the new AI tools is doing themselves a disservice. You will find out which ones are “AI slop”, which are just fancy stored procs or web apps, and which are actually useful for you and/or your job.

I agree that workplaces shouldn’t be mandating the use of AI, but that’s very rarely the case.

My team and I have implemented Agentic AI into the business in ways that will save literally thousands of man-hours a year, as well as drastically reduce support tickets, and give non-devs extremely powerful insights into real time analytics that they’ve never been able to have even with PowerBi/Kibana/AppInsights/etc.

The software engineer acknowledged that AI tools can help improve productivity if used properly, but for programmers with relatively limited experience, he feels the harm is greater than the benefit.

So it’s just like every other tool out there for developers and most other professions.

Honestly it’s getting to be like people blaming stackexchange for their code being shit and not working when all they did was copy/paste a solution from there.

“A poor tradesman blames his tools” as they say.