A lot of ink has been spilled on the programmers who got replaced by AI agents. But it doesn’t sound like it’s a whole better for the ones who avoided getting the axe, either.
According to Deedy Das, a partner at the VC firm Menlo Ventures, the rapid embrace of AI tools is tearing companies apart by creating a “class divide” between brainless vibe coders and experienced engineers. The veteran “craftsmen” engineers — the ones who actually care about their profession — are forced to wade through and fix the swamp of terrible AI code that comes their way, leaving them despondently questioning their livelihoods.
“Most software engineers are facing an identity crisis bordering on depression,” Das wrote in a lengthy X post, spotted by Business Insider.
Das is speaking to an increasingly documented trend in tech and tech adjacent sectors. Bosses are demanding that employees use AI tools as much as they can, with some workplaces like Meta even factoring their workers’ AI usage into their performance reviews. It’s not an entirely top-down phenomenon: “tokenmaxxing” is the meme-cum-ethos that chronically online engineers have embraced this year, in which excessive AI usage is a virtue.
Some studies have explored this phenomenon. One harbingered the bureaucracy of “workslop” — shoddy AI-generated outputs that lazy workers pass onto their colleagues. This creates the illusion of increased productivity, but in reality needs to be corrected by a fastidious coworker. Brewing resentment ensues.
Das describes this dynamic in dramatic fashion.
“The craftsmen are tired,” he wrote. “Day after day, their workload grows. Bugs seep into production. No one seems to care. Another round of AI is thrown at it. Their animosity to their colleagues rises.”
“Eventually, they give up,” he added. “The craft they loved is dead.”
Indeed, plunging spirits are being felt across the industry. Meta has demoralized its workforce by firing thousands of employees, pushing the survivors to use AI, and relocating them onto “soulless” AI projects they have no interesting in work on.
The actual economics of AI automation, meanwhile, remain pretty dubious. Companies are using so many AI agents that consultancies are cautioning against “AI agent sprawl.” And they’re racking up absurd usage fees, with one unnamed firm reportedly blowing $500 million on Claude in a single month.
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