When I started using AI tools seriously across my side projects, I expected the work to get easier. AI handles the boilerplate, I focus on the interesting parts. That was the promise. It didn't get easier. The interesting parts got harder, more frequent, and more exhausting. I am not alone in this. A Google Staff Engineer recently went viral for leaving the company - not for pay, not for perks, but because the work had become rushed and less meaningful. AI was being pushed into places it did not belong. He was getting paged at 2am. He wrote: "I don't want to be just another execution arm for someone else." If this is happening at Google - one of the most technically capable organisations on the planet - it is worth asking what AI is actually doing to software engineering. Not in the press releases. In practice. Here is what I think is really going on.…