Navigating a Broken Dev Culture

My Current Job is a Mess—But I Won’t Let It Define Me (Disclaimer: Not here to trash my company, just sharing my experience.) I work on the AI team at my current job, meaning I get to play with cutting-edge generative AI tech. I’ve built some pretty cool things: • Designed an end-to-end image generation pipeline for a virtual friend app. • Implemented self-hosted Stable Diffusion with Automatic1111, adding sentiment-based image optimization & image retrieval. • Used Vicuna (uncensored) + VLLM for serving our text model. Sounds exciting, right? That’s about where the good part ends. The Bad: A Tech Culture Stuck in the Stone Age The engineering practices at my company are, to put it mildly, nonexistent: • Testing? None. Even revenue-generating products (~$200K/yr) are tested manually. • Deployments? Manual SSH into the server, copy the build, and pray. • CI/CD? What’s that? • Docker/Kubernetes? Not in our vocabulary. • Code Quality? Negative. I’ve tried pushing for be