My previous work enforced the use of AI for everything besides wipping your own butt. I was a senior dev and adamantly refused to use it for ethical reasons.

Not once have I touched it, not once I felt I needed it. I said as much whenever I had meetings with eng. managers and I could provably argue that I was doing very fine without it, I was in fact as much or more productive than my AI addled colleagues and furthermore I found many severe bugs in their PRs. I saw the code quality and stability of my project take a deep plunge because of Claude. They said it was company policy to use… but because it was not on my contract and I was not falling behind on any of my responsibilities I answered I would rather be fired than to use AI. I never was. I kept at this for a year, and finally changed to somewhere where my judgement on when and where to use these things is more important than KPIs.

It’s not that I didn’t see a use case for AI - I saw very minor use cases for dashboards and quick insight into logs - but as much as I can I don’t allow managers and KPIs to have this much control over how I work and which tools I use.