AI Didn't Make Software Engineering Easier. It Made the Hard Parts Harder.

When I started using AI tools seriously across my side projects, I expected the work to get easier. AI handles the boilerplate, I focus on the interesting parts. That was the promise. It didn't get easier. The interesting parts got harder, frequent, and exhausting. I am not alone in this. A Google Staff Engineer recently went viral for leaving the company - not for pay, not for perks, but because the work had become rushed and less meaningful. AI was being pushed into places it did not belong. He was getting paged at 2am.