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I work as an IT consultant and I have 20 years of experience. Recently I've been doing interviews with potential new clients. Last week I had one with a major Fintech company (we're talking one of the biggest in the world, hundreds of engineers). During the interview, they asked me how I approach an unfamiliar codebase. I said what I always say: I start by reading the unit tests to understand intent, then go through existing documentation and diagrams, then I read the actual code to build a mental model of what's happening. The interviewer looked at me and asked: "Why don't you just ask AI to explain it to you? It's much faster." I explained that AI can be a useful tool here, but I want to genuinely understand the code and I want to be certain I'm not internalizing a hallucinated explanation and building on top of it. The interviewer was visibly disappointed. Then they asked about my approach to developing new features or fixing bugs. Same story. I walked through my process: reproduce the issue, trace it through the code, understand the root cause, write a fix, test it. Again: "Why not just use an AI agent to find the bug and fix it for you? It's much quicker." I gave the same reasoning about hallucinations and wanting confidence in the code I ship. The interviewer's response genuinely stunned me: "That's only a problem if you don't check the results afterward. Nowadays it's much easier to just let AI do all the work and check it at the end." I didn't get the job. The feedback was essentially that I don't use AI enough. Here's the thing though: I wish I could say this was an isolated incident. Last month, my current client (the largest hospitality company in Europe) held a workshop for all their developers. Tech leadership stood up in front of the entire engineering org and essentially told everyone they should be vibe coding. The reasoning was identical to what I heard in that Fintech interview: AI makes everything quicker, just let it do the work and check the results at the end. So now I've seen this from two sides: I got rejected by a company for not using it enough, and I'm watching another company actively mandate it from the top down. These aren't small companies, these are massive, established companies with complex systems: one handling people's money, one handling millions of bookings across an entire continent. I'm still processing all of this. I'm not anti-AI. I use it daily, but there's a difference between using AI as a tool that improves your understanding and using it as a replacement for having any understanding at all. My question to this community: is this the new normal? Have companies fully bought into "AI does the work, humans spot-check" as an engineering philosophy? And if so... what does that mean for those of us who still believe that actually understanding what your code does is a professional responsibility, not a productivity bottleneck? Because right now I feel like the dinosaur in the room and I'm not sure I want to evolve into whatever this is.