I've had a theory for years that the free market is mostly a myth, that really most business execs are herd animals who form their strategies by copying others. Usually they copy the ones in the same industry, making them all look pretty much the same.
That's one of the reasons we have economic cycles. It's because trends come and go in waves. When one wave bankrupts a bunch of companies, they start to dig out and then the next wave hits, endlessly.
All kinds of things! I work with AI every day to do various kinds of work. Coding. Research. Brainstorming. I write up notes nearly every day and then I post a summary of each week on Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/cw/aiconfessions
Developing a graph-based programming language called Graphoid. The original concept was to target AI-related programming. Probably not ready for that yet!
Claude Code is doing the majority of the coding, with close supervision from me. I write notes while I'm working on it. Notes are here: https://www.patreon.com/cw/aiconfessions
I'm using Claude AI to build an experimental programming language I call Graphoid. (Built for dealing with graphs). It's early days and I don't know how worthwhile it is but I'm having fun.
Bingo! You found the prize! Putting tech that is prone to hallucination in charge of anything that has serious consequences when it's wrong is a terrible idea. You do not want hallucinated payments or receipts, or legal citations. You want these things to be both true and correct, EVERY TIME.
You are in a completely normal dev shop. What's happened is that the start up mentality of "ship something - anything, and ship it NOW" has infected everything. Maybe over time you can make it better. But educating management can be a slow and frustrating process. Good luck!
Vibecoding is bad coding. Always. Even if I take the headline as correct, so what? It's still crap code that will collapse into an unmaintainable mess sooner rather than later.
I'm no longer at the company but yesterday was my last day so my information is still current.
The division I worked in was demanding that developers use AI at least once a week and they were tracking people's usage. The boss nagged about it every day.
I had no problem meeting the requirement but did find it's contributions to be very hit or miss as to usefulness.
It's an interesting model but in practice I don't think anyone is really all one way or all the other. A better way to approach it might be to find out which narratives are most important to someone and how far they'll go to protect them.
In the end, being a fact-based person might just be a narrative you hold about yourself.
The longest period of unemployment I've ever experienced ended about 6 months ago. I was unemployed for 11 months. The company that finally hired me was intentionally targeting people with lots of experience. I have that. They also pay less than I used to make but I took it because I needed a job.
Previous to that period of unemployment, my resume tended to get noticed. I got interviews from 3 applications out of 5. But this time, it was 3 out of 150.
Read that last paragraph again. My resume has not gotten worse. I still have decades of experience, a master's degree and a bunch of patents. That used to count for something.
My conclusion is that the market has gotten much worse for people with experience who don't hide being white and male.
Your complaint that jobs are for the specific tech stack is spot on. Employers are currently treating every job as a specialization. It's a combination of a filtering technique (because there are too many candidates for every job right now) and complete stupidity (Because there are too many options for tech stacks so that, sometimes, your pool is very shallow indeed).
I'm older than you are and have been out of work for longer than ever before in my life. BUT I finally got a decent offer and will be starting a new job soon. There is hope.
That's one of the reasons we have economic cycles. It's because trends come and go in waves. When one wave bankrupts a bunch of companies, they start to dig out and then the next wave hits, endlessly.