Honestly the most insightful comment in this conversation.
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions." I would substitute the word "paved" with "begins." It is the very rare business that inevitably doesn't succumb to enshitification.
Nothing will take years off your life better than working for people you don't like in a company you don't want to work at.
I guess that is the problem with the current state of the world. Employers hold most of the cards and people are desperate to find and retain employment. As someone who has coupled themselves to the wrong trains more than I'd like to admit, I'd encourage all young engineers to ask themselves, "Is work more important than your mental and physical health?" Don't underestimate the affect of toxic people, management and companies on your brain and body. Over time you may pay the ultimate price; an early death.
I voluntarily retired at age 55 after a startup I was a principal in for five years ran out of money (raising funds was not my responsibility). Having worked from home during most of that time, and having nobody to report to other than myself, I decided I couldn't go back to the grind. I was fortunate enough that my wife earns enough and has good enough benefits that I don't need to work. It took a lot of paying down debt and massaging our finances, but it's worked out swimmingly. We're doing far better on one income than we ever did on two. Obviously, at my age, there are no kids in the picture. Not only am I her personal assistant (she's a teacher), but I take care of the household, which takes a ton of stress off her plate.
I could see a world where cognitive decline takes place, but it's actually been the opposite for me. When I'm not fulfilling my responsibilities as my wife's assistant and taking care of the household, I have many hours during the day to pursue my own passions. I've also been much more structured with my time. I actively journal. I spend time with friends and family. I occasionally do things for fun like fly fishing. I set aside a specific time to read every day for pleasure and learning. I go to bed at a set time and wake up at 5am. I probably log anywhere from 8 to 16 hours a day doing agentic AI coding and design in Claude Code. Freed from the treadmill of employment and the grind of keeping up with the fast pace of deeply learning new technology, I feel sharper than I have in decades. It also doesn't hurt that my passion projects are generating income, which keeps me highly motivated and mentally engaged.
I'm sure those of you that read this probably think that I didn't retire. I think an argument can be made for and against this. I feel retired. I just don't fill all of my time with leisure which I think is the trap that many retired people fall into. The things that I do to keep mentally sharp are intentional choices. It just so happens that those things are things that resemble work.
I bought the master collection CS6 in 2010 and still use it to this day to maintain legacy files. To my delight, it still does 99% of everything I need to do. I haven't given Adobe a dime since. Unlike Autodesk that has maintained its moat (vendor lock-in) around AutoCAD through patents, Adobe has not had a piece of software I couldn't replace with a free or low-cost alternative for the last 15 years. I'm not against paying companies for their software, but it is clear that the conflated subscription models/licenses have come at a cost to their reputation.
I've been on 5x for a couple of months and the closest I've got to my weekly limits is 75%. I've hit 5-hr limits twice (expected). I'm a solo dev that uses CC anywhere from 8-12+ hr each day, 7 days a week. I've never experienced any of the issues others complain about other than the feeling that my sessions feel a little more rushed. I'd say that overall I have very dialed-in context management which includes: breaking work across sessions in atomic units, svelte claude.md/rules (sub 150 lines), periodic memory audit/cleanup, good pre-compact discipline, and a few great commands that I use to transfer knowledge effectively between sessions, without leaving a trailing pile of detritus. Some may say that this is exhaustive, but I don't find it much different than maintaining Agile discipline.
Netlfix raises its prices for the second time in years. Prime Video ads are so invasive that I honestly can't watch any video without turning it off immediately (I refuse to pay for the ad free tier), and now I'm seeing very long ads in the middle of YouTube videos.
Two months ago I just stopped watching streaming services all together. The friction of enshitification reached such a boiling point that I lost all joy in watching anything. I cancelled those services I personally paid for and stopped watching those that I don't. My life improved in clear ways. I began reading for pleasure again. Each night at 10pm I sit down in my reading chair, get comfy and read 2 chapters of: one book for enjoyment and one book for learning. It didn't hurt that the first book I read was Atomic Habits! I noticed that my sleep schedule and quality of sleep improved. I've also been more dedicated to my passion projects as well. You don't really realize how invasive these things are until you remove them from your life. I had already given up all social media except Reddit a couple of years ago. Even now I stay away from hot bed subreddits (typically news oriented ones) to preserve my mental health. From 2010-2018 I actually did a test to give up a smart phone in favor of a flip phone, but that became untenable.
So thank you to all the enshitified streaming services for helping me restore balance in my life.
Probably not the answer you want to here but I'll share my perspective. Three years ago my wife and I sat down and optimized our finances so I could soft-retire and focus on a few of my life goals while simultaneously working on ways to generate income without the stress of being in the employ of others. It was tough work which mainly involved paying down a lot of debt so we can live more lean. We did a lot of optimization and of course some compromise and lifestyle changes. Fortunately, my wife earns enough for us to still live comfortably on a single income.
Now I am her part-time personal assistant which has taken a big load off her plate and reduced her stress significantly. A lot of this work is clerical: writing emails, grants, curriculum/lessons (she's a teacher), ordering supplies, working with spreadsheets, doing misc. graphic design and other office work. I also take care of the household, finances (mostly) and pets. In my spare time I pursue my lifelong passions (writing, game design, and programming), but with each of these my focus has been channeling those passions into generating income. This is not a requirement of my soft-retirement, but rather a choice I made to create balance between us.
Overall, we are much happier and fulfilled and have managed to carve out a life where we work meaner and leaner without huge sacrifices. In reality, it feels like we are financially better off than we were before.
In a recent Claude Code session I tried using the Google Docs, Drive, and Sheets MCP and was honestly surprised at how limited it felt. It was hard to get anything meaningful done because it just did not expose enough capability to be useful in practice. In hindsight, that frustration was probably a good thing. I ended up skipping MCP entirely and using the LaTeX API plus its plugin ecosystem, and the result was far beyond anything I could have realistically produced through Docs anyway.
I have seen a similar pattern with Canva’s MCP. I pay for Pro, but the one feature that would actually make MCP useful, Auto Fill, is gated behind an enterprise plan. So the surface is there, but the real power is locked away.
I get that this is still the wild west for MCP, and I agree with the OP’s general take. But right now there is a big gap between "integration exists" and "integration is actually useful." Personally, I am more excited about where something like WebMCP could go, where the default assumption is full capability rather than a restricted subset.
I have a bachelor's and master's in Industrial Design. When I first entered the software industry after grad school in 2000 a master's was the floor for work in UI Design or Information Architecture (Ux wasn't a job title at this time). Many of the people I worked with in these early days were CogPsy PhDs. Design was slow and methodical. This seemed to hold true for the next decade or so. As design as a competitive advantage (or necessity) started to take hold more and more people flocked to Ux. Many in the field today are self-taught, attended bootcamps, or pivoted away from graphic design (thanks Dribble) to Ux. Did we lose something when many Ux practitioners no longer have roots in HCI, library sciences, human-computer interaction, industrial design, human factors? I'm not going to judge. Myself, I transitioned from Ux to programming.
I was one of the first few Ux designers for a large defense contractor that made data-link communication devices for the military. Prior to my arrival all the GUIs were done in Matlab. Think 80s VCR-level complexity. Needless to say, these GUIs were not well received by the boots-on-the-ground soldier that had to operate the equipment. Furthermore, they were a complete mystery to the top brass who funded these projects.
When I arrived, some groups in the organization had begun to refactor these Matlab interfaces into WPF applications with slick new updates to the widgets, but it was really lipstick on a pig. After listening to all the stakeholders and users our proposal was to develop a skeuomorphic radio interface (green box with a bunch of dials and frequency display). Only the critical controls were featured on the radio face. All of the configuration options were buried. Now, I get all the eye-rolling when it comes to skeuomorphism as a fad, but it really resonated with our target audience and their superiors. This "Virtual Radio" soon became the defacto style for all communication devices throughout the organization. Because of the animation capabilities of VPF we were able to mimic both the look and feel of the various analog radio controls. It was super realistic. More importantly it allowed us to more easily communicate our designs to a broad audience, including: soldiers, contractors, technicians, and top brass. It has been nearly a decade since I left the company. I hope that this design has gone away. Not because it was ineffective (or trendy), but rather these communication systems needed to evolve to be self-configuring and self-operating, requiring little if any interaction by a soldier other than monitoring. After all, the best interface is one that doesn't need to exist.
I think that what is lost is that Javascript is more of a functional language than an object-oriented one and a move to hooks embraces its functional roots while eliminating numerous footguns (this), simplifying reuse, and reducing redundancy.
I must be very out of touch with the gaming habits of millenials. The intro movie itself seemed like some nerdy wish-fulfillment. Who acts like this? Where can I meet some stunning gaming hottie like the one in the airport? Will the Switch make my life this fantastic?
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions." I would substitute the word "paved" with "begins." It is the very rare business that inevitably doesn't succumb to enshitification.