You actually cannot. There are standards to meet to qualify as a true religious exemption. There have been many court cases where people tried to claim religious beliefs when convenient for them, which were denied because they couldn’t meet the threshold for being a real religious belief.

There are also limitations on what accommodations can be requested. If you took a job mowing lawns and then had a religious belief against harming living plants, you wouldn’t collect paychecks while you watched your coworkers mow lawns. They would have to find other work for you if they could, like raking leaves or lawnmower maintenance. If they didn’t have that work, then you wouldn’t have a job.

The raking leaves example was to make a point. For a programming job you could be exempted from using AI tools to do the work, but you would still have to do the work at a reasonable standard.

This is not true. The accommodation is only possible if it doesn't present undue hardship, safety concerns, etc. Plenty of accommodations can be denied on those grounds.

Which is better than getting no exceptions - if only the two extremes are available.

How is this a problem? And what would you propose to do about the negative symptoms of the “problem”.

Some might say this is a feature not a bug of religious freedom

This is just a consequence of the philosophically liberal metaphysics, anthropology, and resulting moral views and political orders they produce. Once you accept those premises, they act as a corrosive agent that can be deployed to dissolve all sorts of truths opposed to someone's conception of "autonomy" and "freedom" and you really have no defense as long as your thinking is subject to them. It's why the Right has consistently lost all sorts of cultural battles. They, too, are liberals - because we're all liberals, culturally - and as long as they remain so, their "reactionary" behavior will largely remain rooted in mere sentimental attachment to an imagined past rather than something intellectually substantive. Hence, why what falls under the label of "postliberalism" has a much stronger shot. It is an intellectual rejection of liberalism with intellectual substance that often draws on robust metaphysical and anthropological "alternatives" to liberalism, as it were.