But I’ve never had sympathy for engineers who think all the process around them is net negative, because nothings ever stopped engineers from striking out on their own, without all that, and making great businesses.

Not all process is pointless, but needless process by definition is. There are also a shit ton of things that stop engineers from "striking out on their own".

If your PM and VPs are bringing you down, go it alone. If you can’t pull that together into a paycheck then maybe it’s not all as useless as some say.

The whole talk of "go[ing] it alone" kinda strikes me as "bootstrapping", libertarian non-sense.

I don't want to do marketing, sales, finance, legal, and product bullshit myself. That's why I'm an employee.

Two things can be true at the same time, for instance, a company can have a lot of bloated, needless process that stifles people and still pull in enough money to be able to pay for their employees to live a life.

With the amount of market concentration there is in every sector as far as the eye can see, nearly every software-producing company has a cash cow of some sort, and then has a bunch of complete money losers that are subsidized by that cash cow.

So, it's completely possible that the company overall fully sucks and hasn't developed anything new of value to someone in decades, but the legacy business keeps the miserable employees from the bread line.

To return to the point, AI doesn't solve any of this or even help with it.