I'm not sure what the right vocabulary would be to describe this, but this sounds more like the calculations behind nuclear war than a healthy collegiality or cooperative work relationship. This sets up a competition to determine a loser based on resource scarcity, not a way to achieve mutual goals to advance the organization's goals.
You are thinking of "game theory" and it's what happens when your coworkers don't give a shit. And all it takes is one, both because they can degrade product quality faster than you can gate it or fix it and because the performance assessment techniques are about 3 years behind the state of LLMs and if they play, you have to also or you'll get shit on from such a height you won't even know what hit you.
And once you start playing the game, then one day - it doesn't take long - you wake up and ask yourself if this is how you want to spend 8 hours of your life monday through friday. I think a lot of us are saying no but now need to figure out where our money is going to come from. I don't have the answers.
“Token Standoff.” The most efficient token consumer wins. This mutually assured time efficiency destruction is driven by management support of aggressive use of AI in an attempt to, in some combination, increase productive and constrain labor costs.
In a previous job, we had this saying "killing penguins" we used when referring to throwing more computing resources (more GNU/Linux instances) than necessary at a problem. In today's landscape of indiscriminate AI spending, I bet we could repurpose the term to mean "actually negatively impacting the arctic biodiversity".
This is the point where you decide. It used to be low stakes and easy to care about the job you did for other people.
Do you want to put the same effort into your job when nobody else does, or should you reserve your thoughts and just feed it back into the LLM?
The LLMs are being advertised as output increasers but companies so far are using them as excuses to fire people instead of creating previously unbelievable things. It might be better to feed your coworkers output back in and use your thoughts to start the company you thought you never had time for.
What I don’t understand is what value is the person adding to this equation? Put another way, what’s the difference between them feeding the wall of text to the LLM, and you feeding the wall of text to the LLM, bypassing them in the process entirely?
The role of the person in the equation is to take personal responsibility for the proposed change and review the changes prior to PR submission. You can't put AI on a PIP. It's acceptable to use AI as a coding assistant in 2026, but if a human is not reviewing what they submit and taking responsibility, their value is on par with a ChatGPT subscription.
The same as if they said it was copied from stack overflow, or if it’s wrong; “I think there’s a problem here, it’s XYZ”. If your peer ignores you and you were wrong, it was their call to make. If you were right - take it to them or the manager depending on how many times it’s happened.
Don’t ever write this in a professional environment. It’s childish ant achieves nothing other than pissing off the person it’s targeted at and probably the manager who now has to deal with a shitty behaviour complaint.