With the exception of 3 (How to survive in the world of AI: use AI!), these have all been par for the course all along if you wish to succeed at senior+ level.

With the current surge, everyone is (expected to act as) a senior/mentor to a swarm of workers that lack interpersonal/business context.

It’s not a huge shift if you’re already deeply invested in business lore, but it’s unfortunately a brutal speedrun of skills that were previous slowly accumulated for new/junior hires.

"If you resist AI, it helps to ask why"

I am not intrinsically opposed AI. I am opposed to its environmental and social impacts. I constantly see spamming AI bots that send zillions of useless or poor-quality PRs to OSS. I see PRs that add features, but are really huge, making maintenance even harder in the future without the help of AI. AI creates bloatware everywhere. I see AI trained on stolen data without respecting licenses. I see data centers popping up at a scale never seen, consuming more and more energy. more and more resources (They basically consumed all RAM/SSD of 2026).

"It drives rising energy prices in poor communities, disrupts wildlife and fresh water supplies, increases pollution, and stresses global supply chains. It re-enforces the horrible, dangerous working conditions that miners in many African countries are enduring to supply rare metals like Cobalt for the billions of new chips that this boom demands. And at a moment when the climate demands immediate action to reduce our footprint on this planet, the AI boom is driving data centers to consume a full 1.5% of the world’s total energy production in order to eliminate jobs and replace them with a robot that lies." [0]

I am tired of people that have no concerns about climate change or the impact of their collective actions on other humans. I hope that one day everyone will be judged for their role in this system.

[0] https://drewdevault.com/2026/03/25/2026-03-25-Forking-vim.ht...

Most of that article is just good career advice in general, so I'll just comment on the part about AI.

One major problem I see with the use of AI is that it will prevent people from building an understanding of <insert problem domain X here>. This will reduce people's ability to drive AI correctly, creating a circular problem.

It's not like "spend more time away from the screen" is a real choice that is actually offered to "codemonkey ICs", like myself, in most workplaces, and I haven't seen AI change a damn thing about that. If anything, it has become worse. With AI raising the expectations about how much code I need to ship per unit of time (and all the responsibility for that code actually working still resting with me), I am more glued to the screen than ever.

Spend more time away from the screen and meet real people - Coincidentally, this is a use case that I'm about to task OpenClaw with. I'm going to make a personal social events coordinator of sorts where I give it my interests, tell it where it can find local events related to those interests, then let it suggest them as they come up and add them to my calendar. Then I can just show up and do the fun stuff and automate the boring part of finding things to do.