I'm literally being told at my job that I should view myself basically as an AI babysitter

Feel you 100%.
I dunno why but my entire career everyone always talks like doing IT is simply a stepping stone to becoming a manager, so stupid. Like god forbid you're not the lEaDeRsHiP type.
And now with the rise of "Agentic IDEs" it's even fucking worse, I don't want to be managing people let alone herding a pack of ~~blind cats~~ autonomous agents.

Unfortunately the only solution is to stop caring, Yes, really.
I know it hurts producing sub-par garbage when you know you're capable of much more, but unfortunately there's no other way.
If upper management doesn't care about delivering quality products to their consumers anymore, you shouldn't either. You'll stress and burn yourself out meanwhile those responsible won't lose a blink of sleep over it.
Do exactly what they want. Slop it all. Fuck it. Save your energy for what really matters.

That or start looking for another job, but you might find it hard find one who isn't doing the same shit.

My company does annual reviews. You have to write your own review, then they will read it over and then sit down to talk to you about it.

Last year, I just had ChatGPT write it for me based on all of my past conversations with it. Turned it in. The first question they asked me was, 'Did you use AI to write this?' Without hesitation, I said absolutely. They loved it so much, they had me show everyone else how to do it and made them redo theirs. I couldn't frikin believe it. Everyone is still pissed they have to use ChatGPT this year, but the bosses love that corporate hogwash so much.

They're about to receive a stack of AI-generated drivel so bad that I bet they have everyone go back to handwriting them.

Try to distance yourself from the quality of your work.

Produce AI slop like your overlords fetishise, then have a mouse jiggler wiggle the cursor and an AI answer your Teams messages.

Many people think they're 20% more productive with AI, but they're actually 20% less productive.

https://fortune.com/2025/07/20/ai-hampers-productivity-software-developers-productivity-study/

Ask ChatGPT "How do I unionize my workplace to protect my job against AI obsessed management?"

Stop carrying about the quality of your output and just copy and paste the slop back and forth. its what they want.

You're the sane one.

AI is a tool, just like a hammer. You could use a rock, but that doesn't give you the leverage that a hammer does.

AI is also a machine, it can get you to your destination faster, like a car or train.

Evil people have used hammers, cars, and trains to do evil and horrible things. These things can also be used for useless stupid things, like advertising.

But they can also be used for good, like an ambulance or to transport food. They also make us more efficient and can be used to save resources and effort. It depends on who uses it and how they use it.

You can't control how other people may misuse these things, but you can control how much you know, how you use it, and what you use it for.

If you don't mind me asking, what do you do and kind of AI? Maybe it's the autism but I find LLMs are bit limited and useless but other use cases aren't quite as bad Training image recognition into AI is a legitimately great use of it and extremely helpful. Already being used for such cases. Just installed a vision system on a few of my manufacturing lines. A bottling operation detects cap presence, as well as cross threads or un-torqued caps based on how the neck vs cap bottom angle and distance looks as it passes the camera. Checking 10,000 bottles a day as they scroll past would be a mind numbing task for a human. Other line is making fresnel lenses. Operators make the lenses, and are personally checking each lens for defects and power. Using a known background and training the AI to what distortion good lenses should create when presented is showing good progress at screening just as well as my operators. In this case it's doing what the human eye can't; determine magnification and defraction visually.

I remind my boss that giving AI full access to our codebase and access to environmemts, including prod, is the exact plot of the Silicon Valley episode where Gilfoyle gave Son of Anton access. His AI deleted the codebose after being asked to clean the bugs....deleting the entire codebase was the most efficient way of doing that.

I am also encouraged to use AI at work and also hate it. I agree with your points. I just had to learn to live with it. I've realized that I'm not going to make it go away. All I can do is recognize its limited strengths and significant weaknesses and only use it for limited tasks where it shines. I still avoid using it as much as possible. I also think "improved productivity" is a myth but fortunately that's not a metric I have to worry about.

My rules for myself, in case they help:

• Use it as a tool only for appropriate tasks.
• Learn its strengths and use it for those things and nothing else. You have to keep thinking and exploring and researching for yourself. Don't let it "think" for you. It's easy to let it make you a lazy thinker.
• Quality check everything it gives you. It will often get things flat wrong and you will have to spend time correcting it.
• Take lots of deep breaths.

[Edit: punctuation]

AI tooling producing some things fast

This isn't necessarily a good thing. Yeah, maybe AI wrote a new microservice and generated 100s of new files and 1000s of lines of new code... but... there's a big assumption there that you actually needed 100s of new files and 1000s of lines of new code. What it tends to generate is tech debt. That's also ignoring the benefits of your workforce upskilling by learning more about the system, where things are, how they're pieced together, why they're like that, etc.

AI just adds tech debt in a blackbox. It's gonna lower velocity in the long term.

I do know that I am the minority on Lemmy. I believe, there is a space for AI in our life. Of course it is not the way big corporations is trying to shove down in our throats.
The ethical and moral problems of AI is not part of your question.

If you decide to work for your company that forces you to use AI, then you either use AI or get a new job.
That's how capitalism works.

You don't have to like it. You just have to accept the "must use AI" as part of the things they are paying you for.
There is no metric aside of: they are Paying you to do this way.
If you don't want to do that way - the ball is in your court.

Edit: Browsing Lemmy I just saw this post. Maybe it will help you:
https://lemmy.ml/post/40233766

I’m not quite in the same boat (not a programmer) but my job has suggested giving AI a try for some things. I’ve poked around a bit to see if it’s good at those tasks but so far it’s wildly inconsistent. I told my boss I didn’t think it made much sense to try to come up with meaningful workflows using AI because every few weeks the behavior changes and you’d have to re-write documentation and re-think the workflow given the new behavior to make sure it still resulted in good data that could be meaningfully compared to decades of archive. This frequent re-assessment of the entire workflow is necessary to ensure data integrity and takes longer than just doing it manually in steps I purposely designed to make it hard for a human to mess up.

AI needs human oversight for complex projects because you can’t have pieces shifting around without careful consideration. In my case using AI is a bigger time sink than using tools with precise and reliable behavior because it requires a lot more review. My boss found my reasoning compelling.

I can imagine it being useful to people in the early early prototype stage when the specifics or efficiency don’t matter much and you’re just trying to get the gist of a new idea.

Same as everything else in life - like the bits that are useful to you and ignore the rest.

As for doing what you're told at work, who said we had to like it provided it's a reasonable request?

I’m at a point where I must adapt

What's wrong with adapting? The one constant in life is that things change. This is a change and you're not the only person who has faced their job changing - at least you still have it. Adapt or go raise goats.

It definitely sounds like you've already decided to find AI useless regardless of what it can do, but on the chance that I can maybe change your mind a little bit...

I'm a huge AI skeptic myself, at least compared to my coworkers. Almost everything it spits out has been incorrect for me, except in very narrow use cases.

First, I find it useful to find links to actual documentation for tools/libraries/languages I am completely unfamiliar with. The examples and text it generates are usually poor, but it can do a decent job of finding webpages.

Second, I've found it good at guided code reviews. It is no substitute for a real human review, but adding an AI pass before you open a pull request can knock off some of the low hanging fruit.

Step one: get a hammer

Step two: smash noggin with hammer

Step 3: continue to smash your noggin with hammer

Step 4: keep smashing

Step five: you are now a tech bro who loves AI.

Make a list of the tasks you hate doing or are repetitive, time consuming and not normally automateable. Then see if any of them are a good fit for an AI workflow.

The problem is I hate AI. I hate every fucking thing about it. Its primary purpose, regardless of what utility is gained, is spam.

You are describing one type of AI, that being Generative AI. Even more specifically, Generative AI from publicly trained models, examples being ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok. If you hate those, don't use those. This isn't the only AI that exists.

We're getting into data science here, but you can build and train Machine Learning models exclusively on your own data. So no theft/spam contamination here. If your needs are in the Generative AI space, you could even build and deploy your own Fine Tuned model from your own data on top of one of the public models, so it would have knowledge of your business or industry.

All AI incarnations are just tools. You don't start with a tool. You start with a problem to solve, and you use a tool to assist or make it better. So the beginning of this journey is asking the question: "What problem are you trying to solve?"