Rolling my eyes doesn’t mean refusing to use or evaluate the technology and it doesn’t mean being “rebellious”. Just that it’s exhausting to constantly be bombarded with tertiary crap that isn’t useful to my regular tasks. It’s similar to any other form of marketing. It’s exhausting because it’s a constant barrage, and it’s impossible to survive without tuning out most of the noise most of the time. And most AI news is in fact nothing more than marketing.
Just rolling over and accepting whatever the company or industry throws at you is not a healthy way to interact with the professional world. Maybe it’s different elsewhere, but in the US where I’m located, this approach is how employees end up working excessive unpaid overtime with nothing to show for it but a 1% raise at the end of the year and divorce papers from their spouse. God forbid you actually use PTO for something other than a life-threatening medical emergency. Might as well just lay yourself off at that point. Being defiant or rebellious is also a terrible idea. When I was in my 20s I thought that way, but eventually I realized it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie and not burn a bridge at least until you’ve crossed to the next island.
I should clarify here that I’m speaking of the US workplace in general and not my current employer. My employer is actually very good about PTO and rest time with family, etc, but in my experience in the US workforce, that’s the exception not the rule.
And FWIW, I’ve been in the workforce for over 10 years, and I’ve actually changed careers twice and burned out once, so I’m no stranger to navigating the politics and unreasonable demands of industry. I’m new to the tech industry/professional software dev, but I’ve been programming my entire adult life and I’ve been in the field and in the conference room at multiple companies in multiple industries in past careers. The tech industry seems to be pretty much the same as any other industry as far as how to get hired and keep a job go. It just seems to be loaded full of executives that are abnormally insulated from other industries, which means some decision makers are less predictable. Once the bubble pops, AI will likely become one of those “required skills” that you need to have at least basic competency in for most jobs and to be an expert in for jobs that it’s actually relevant for. Similar to Excel for the Accounting field (which I worked in before). You’d be hard-pressed to get any job in the Accounting or Office Administration fields without basic Excel skills like macros and pivot tables, but most jobs don’t care if you can do actual data analysis in it. It’s just an everyday tool that everyone needs to be familiar with. It’s much more important that you actually understand double-entry accounting and how to three-way match an invoice. But even with those fundamentals, you only really need to have a basic understanding of them to get an entry-level role.
Anyway, I believe I’ve been pretty fair/moderate in most of my messages on this thread, but that hasn’t really gotten through it seems. Maybe I’ve been less amicable than I thought. Discussion seems to be very polarized on this topic in general, so it’s hard to have a productive discussion about the actual pros and cons of the technology, and I’m sure I’m no exception to that even if I feel like I am. All things in software are tradeoffs, but AI seems to be one of those topics that invites the extreme sides like OOP vs FP from a while back. I appreciate you taking the time to offer the objectively good advice to evaluate the technology and then make an informed decision. I just want to point out that there seems to always be an assumption among AI-advocates that when someone says they don’t like AI or don’t see its usefulness in a particular domain/workflow (e.g. code gen), then that means they haven’t evaluated it for themselves and that decision was not an informed one. What may be super useful for one person, might be completely useless for another. CSS is directly useful for my regular work (even though I’m a BE dev). Fragment shaders are not (though knowledge of how they work is remarkably helpful). A game programmer would be on the opposite side of that though. AI is not a magical wonder-technology that is immune to this fundamental truth. It’s probably the most widely-applicable technology that’s hit the industry to-date, but we still have a way to go before we finally find the one true hammer. 
Now, as far as discussion goes, I’m actually curious what the different sides in this thread think about the economics of AI. Engineers seem to have a tendency to focus on the technical merits of these things without really considering the unit-economics of it. That’s part of how we ended up with $100k+ cloud bills, but that’s a whole other can o’ worms. Given the fact that none of the AI companies making these models have managed to make an actual profit off of them and are still relying on the ponzi-esque VC/grant infusion business model to keep going, it seems pretty risky for any company to become too heavily reliant on AI tooling unless development/operation of the models themselves can be made much more financially efficient. If OpenAI or Anthropic control the supply, and most of the industry can’t meet their client deliverables without these tools, then things will get bad once investors decide they finally want their return. I haven’t been keeping up with the latest gossip in the field though, so maybe this has changed? 
