Software engineers have drawn a line. Many simply will not accept assignments that bar them from using AI coding assistants. The stance emerged clearly this spring when researchers at METR attempted to rerun a controlled productivity trial. Participants declined. They would not work without AI, even for a limited set of tasks in a study setting. The refusal, reported first by TechCrunch on May 29, 2026, underscores a profound shift. Developers have grown so accustomed to tools like Cursor, GitHub Copilot and Claude-powered editors that stepping back feels intolerable. Yet the very study they helped make impossible delivered uncomfortable news in 2025: experienced programmers took 19 percent longer to finish real issues from their own open-source repositories when allowed to use frontier AI models. METR’s randomized controlled trial recruited 16 seasoned contributors to large projects. These developers averaged years of familiarity with their codebases.…