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Software engineers are facing an 'identity crisis bordering on depression,' Menlo Ventures partner says
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
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Software engineer, here. Yep, the burnout is real. I consider myself fortunate, however; with the skyrocketing cost of AI, my employer has been urging us to do as much as possible by hand lately to cut back on token usage.
I think that's pretty much where the entire industry will go soon.
I really hope you're right. My company is still in the "use as much as possible" phase, and my manager is quoting Jensen about "you need to use half your salary on tokens!". I'm looking for other work, but everyone is looking for vibe coders at the moment it seems...
I've gone from really loving my job, to hate my life.
Mo Bitar had a bit of advice that I think is applicable here: Lie. Claim to be an extreme 10x vibe whatever. Put "AI enablement" (whatever the fuck that means) in your LinkedIn profile. And wherever you get hired, commit to using enormous amounts of tokens as they require.
Then just... write code. Oh, definitely use the LLMs, too, but not for anything important. Set them to work writing BASH scripts or something. Get them burning through tokens to summarize all the corporate documentation you can find. Have agents creating agents to test the output of other agents and report to more agents on what the agents are doing. Meanwhile, do real work. Make sure that for every PR, you have the AI do one thing on it, to give it that code-slop shine.
Sucks that this is where we're at, but it is what it is.
I've had LLM generate so many web sites about various random animals I've crammed into a prompt. No one wants web sites about those random animals, but my management is pleased at my token utilization.
Can do my real work and get praised for my actual productivity, and burn the tokens to get praised on AI adoption...