AI Gave Us Lemons. We Picked Limoncello

Here's the thing. These days it's become genuinely hard to maintain professional motivation in software engineering. The level of bullshit is off the charts, everyone lies from companies to ChatGPT. AI rewrote this, AI replaced those people, AI this AI that blah blah blah. Today you're a lead engineer, people listen to you, tomorrow you're on the street under a bridge. Why? Well, random picked you. So what's the point of continuing to do engineering? Maybe I should not have listened to my mom and become a surgeon after all, but we are where we are. AI really amplified this problem. Before you could at least stand tall on your skills, now that everyone is convinced three Claude Code agents can write any code, it's become very hard to prove you're something more than a useless bunch of cells, a layer between a manager and the real deal, the LLM. On one hand sure, we can separate work and life, you know, touch grass, do pilates, drink water. On the other hand the professional part of us i