The Cynical Developer^®

A quiet split is forming in software teams — not junior versus senior, but developers who’ve learned to work with AI and those who’ve decided not to. We look at what the divide really is, why it compounds, and why plenty of brilliant people are on the wrong side of it.

We dig into the gap between responsibility and ownership — why so many teams are accountable for outcomes they were never given the authority to control, and how “you own this” quietly becomes “you hold the pager”.

We take on the tidy story that remote work killed productivity. It didn’t — it removed the things that were hiding weak management. We look at the presence trap, what genuinely broke, and why the easy diagnosis pointed at the wrong people.

We look at a cost that never shows up on any report: the wreckage an interruption leaves behind. Not the thirty-second question, but the twenty-minute rebuild — and why unpredictability, not volume, is what really destroys deep work.