How AI is destroying my tech team

Disclaimer: this post is written without any AI assistance (except for the generated image cover) to share the real events from my daily experience. It is happening right now. Hey everyone. I'm a Senior Software Engineer working in a medium-sized startup, and a recent introduction of AI is slowly destroying my team under the false claim of improved efficiency. We've always had a pretty small tech team with under 20 engineers with a good mix of senior, middle and junior developers. We've always shared some cool technologies, pair-programmed when possible, brainstormed some new ideas and were pretty connected overall. Unfortunately it all changed with upper management doubling down on integrating coding agents and making them practically mandatory. I started to realize a huge difference after a couple of months of this forced integration: People almost completely stopped talking to each other. There is no more "let's work on this problem together" or "let's refactor this code" - it is al