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Sigh, enforced is always top down, sure, if you want to be pedantic. But normally the process starts with enthusiastic devs, propagates out through other devs until a consensus is reached (e.g. source control is the only sane way) and then management starts to enforce it - often with a crappy enterprise take on the basic idea (I'm looking at you IBM Team Connection and Microsoft Visual SourceSafe).

AI seems to have primarily been pushed top-down from management long before any consensus has been reached from the devs on what it's even good for.

This is unusual; I suspect the reason is that (for once) the tech is more suitable for management functions than the dev stuff. Judging from the amount of bulletpointese generation and condensation I've seen lately anyway.

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It's not pedantic, it's the very issue being discussed.

And there have been plenty of enthusiastic devs regarding LLM's.

And the idea that "until a consensus is reached" is just not true. These practices are often adopted with 1/3 of devs on board and 2/3 against. The whole point of top-down directives is that they're necessary because there isn't broad consensus among employees.

It was the same thing with mobile-first. A lot of devs hated it while others evangelized it, but management would impose it and it made phones usable for a ton of things that had previously been difficult. On the balance, it was a helpful paradigm shift imposed top-down even if it sometimes went overboard.

Do you know a lot of devs who, having tried VCS, were against it?

I lived through the transition, so absolutely.

Early VCS was clunky and slow. If one dev checked out some files, another dev couldn't work on them. People wouldn't check them back in quickly, they'd "hoard" them. Then merges introduced all sorts of tooling difficulties.

People's contributions were now centrally tracked and could be easily turned into metrics, and people worried (sometimes correctly) management would weaponize this.

It was seen by many as a top-down bureaucratic Big Brother mandate that slowed things down for no good reason and interfered with developers' autonomy and productivity. Or even if it had some value, it wasn't worth the price devs paid in using it.

This attitude wasn't universal of course. Other devs thought it was a necessary and helpful tool. But the point is that tons of devs were against it.

It really wasn't until git that VCS became "cool", with a feeling of being developer-led rather than management-led. But even then there was significant resistance to its new complexity, in how complicated it was to reason about its distributed nature, and the difficulty of its interface.