As my burnout sabbatical from tech work goes on, I’ve been reaching out to more and more people I’ve thought of as friendly colleagues, and the conversations invariably, by the other party, turn to LLM coding agents, and I’m hearing a constant refrain

their belief comes down to: If you value ethics more than productivity, you do not belong in tech

we’re halfway through the decade of “hold my beer” and the past year has been particularly disillusioning, but this in particular, especially coming from people who’ve mentored me or whom I’ve particularly gelled with, has felt like an ongoing gut-punch