Thanks for your honesty. It explained some things I watched before retiring. I am one of those people who loved programming and hated what corporate settings made out of it. Yeah, it's one of the better paid things. It's hard work, and there are things that pull it in exactly opposite directions. Sometimes even for simple things like CRUD, when something is requested that would go sideways, you have the choice of rejecting it and avoiding thinking hard, or taking it by the horns. I told my wife, sometimes you just can't leave, and it's not only emergencies. Because if you are in a deep session and you stop, you lose your own context. But it's very satisfying if you can wrap it up in a way that leaving notes for yourself for later suffices. But this style of work is not for everyone. And in corporate settings weird things happen, and sometimes I just felt shat on. But hell, it's paid well, right?
Okay, now that that is out, let me ask politely: in what way do you avoid acting as a meat proxy for AI?
EDIT: re reject, you can do that while acting as accepting it, by saying something like, yeah, let's do that but before starting, we will look at the problem, it's a game of shifting responsiblity to other people. For me that was a corporate game that has nothing to do with programming.