I have a colleague who seems to have lost his mind on the AI wave.
Before this he was an average engineer. He built good tools. Sometimes cool engineering decisions, sometimes not so much. All as usual. An engineer like any other.
He played politics very well. Got promoted to Staff. Sat in meetings, aligned, synced, did his soft-skill things. All good.
Then AI coding arrived
And he probably decided: here’s my chance to level up the hardcore skills. Now I don’t need to negotiate. I don’t need to sit in meetings, or write design docs. I don’t need other people at all anymore. I can do everything myself.
And off he went.
The guardrails are gone
There’s no restraining force left now — none of the colleagues who used to stop his train of thought mid-sentence. The AI slop flows like a river. Internal tools go straight from his head into prod, with nothing in between.
His bot reviews the code instead of him. Piles of chats full of AI reports. AI announcements. AI articles. The man is gone.
Well — not gone. Lost, somewhere, in a frenzied AI agony.
He lost the shore
He lost the shore — that thin layer of colleagues that used to slow his ideas down just enough.
Conclusions?
He’s doing absolutely great. It’s just that kind of time now.