If anything, AI tends to vastly overengineer things (in a bad way) which makes bloat inevitable. But I'm not sure layers of management are to blame. If anything, good management incentivize the right things and focus a team on work that matters. Bad managers only try to empire build and incentivize the wrong things in their engineers.

I've seen orgs that try to flatten too much end up with ICs basically left in the ether without meaningful direction which causes them to 'build to survive'.

The optimist take: maybe building things faster will lead to the dead-end of a product faster and thus force companies to reflect?

In reality, I have a feeling that it would lead to even more encroachement, more doubling down and less useful work.

If anything I’d guess that AI would usher in a Golden Era of Work Theater the likes of which we have never seen

I think that the start of the article was interesting, then it goes down the path of middle managers being the root of all evil, just seems a bit like whiplash.

I completely agree with building the wrong thing is the root cause of a lot of failures. In fact, I think that AI has stopped a lot of the conversation of "Why should I not build this". Historically, that answer was ROI - why spend days/weeks/months on something that might not be valuable. Now I see people just saying "Yes, and" to all feature requests.