This article is brave. It is also is an example of a general issue: we assume our personal experiences are representative when they are, in fact, unique.
“Follow Scrum, Lean / Kanban, or eXtreme Programming to the letter” - there are plenty of failed projects and unhappy devs that have done just that. And these methodologies are not tuned for the LLM-generation age and, talking to lots of other devs around the world, I think it is showing.
In regards to remote work, I’ve worked for shops that have been fully remote since before the pandemic and are wonderful experiences. They’ve figured it out. The OP’s feelings on remote work, to me, say “the companies I’ve worked for are really bad at supporting remote work”, but if you believe your experiences are representative then you say “remote work is bad”.
AI-generated code that doesn’t need to be production ready has been a real boon to usability and design work. Testing with users something that actually saves and displays data, and seeding the app with realistic-looking datasets in both shape and size, reveals usability issues that you just don’t discover in Figma prototypes.
If a product team isn’t performing user research with interactive prototypes as a core part of their dev and design lifecycle, they’re doing themselves a real disservice. It’s so easy now.