Programming Memes

Every junior dev's origin story begins with the sacred words: "I could totally build this from scratch better than [insert literally any established library/framework here]." Then six months later you're debugging your homemade authentication system at 3 AM, crying into your energy drink, wondering why your triangular wheel isn't gaining traction. The universe has blessed us with React, Angular, Vue, and a million battle-tested libraries that have survived the trenches of production environments. But NO—you're gonna write your own state management solution because "it's not that complicated." Spoiler alert: it IS that complicated, and those weird-looking wheels in the picture? That's your custom-built solution that "works perfectly fine" until someone tries to actually use it. Save yourself the existential crisis and just npm install the dang thing. Your future self will thank you when you're not maintaining a Frankenstein monster of spaghetti code that only you understand.

Captain Picard walking back into the office on Monday morning, immediately requesting a damage report from his computer. Because naturally, something broke over the weekend while you weren't looking. Maybe it was that deploy on Friday afternoon. Maybe Jenkins decided to have an existential crisis. Maybe production just spontaneously combusted because the universe hates you. Either way, Monday morning means surveying the wreckage and figuring out which fire to put out first. The weekend was nice while it lasted.

When you finally achieve that pristine state of organization and immediately lock it down like a deprecated GitHub repo. The house is now in maintenance mode—look but don't touch. No new features, no bug fixes, just pure, untouched perfection that will inevitably get messy again within 24 hours. The "read-only" part hits different though. It's giving the same energy as when you mark a project as archived because you know the second someone touches it, merge conflicts will emerge from the void. Except instead of code, it's dishes in the sink and laundry on the couch.

So while everyone's having existential crises about AI replacing programmers, here's a friendly reminder that intelligence follows a bell curve. The folks screaming "AI IS SMART" and "AI WILL REPLACE PROGRAMMERS" are sitting at opposite ends of the IQ distribution, both equally convinced they've figured it all out. Meanwhile, the vast majority in the middle are just like "yeah, AI is a tool that's pretty dumb at a lot of things but useful for some stuff." It's the Dunning-Kruger effect in real time: people with minimal understanding think AI is either a god or completely useless, while those who actually work with it daily know it's more like a very confident intern who occasionally hallucinates entire libraries that don't exist. Sure, it can autocomplete your code, but it'll also confidently suggest you divide by zero if you phrase the question wrong. The real galaxy brain take? AI is a productivity multiplier, not a replacement. But nuance doesn't make for good LinkedIn posts, does it?

The AI gold rush has created three distinct species of developers, and none of them are actually writing code anymore. First up: the Prompt Junkie , desperately tweaking their ChatGPT prompts like a gambler convinced the next spin will hit jackpot. "Just one more iteration bro" - famous last words before spending 4 hours prompt engineering what would've taken 20 minutes to code yourself. Then there's Programming in English guy, who's essentially become an AI therapist. You're not coding anymore, you're having philosophical conversations with Claude about edge cases while it hallucinates increasingly elaborate solutions. The irony? You need to understand programming deeply to even know what to ask for. It's like needing a law degree to hire a lawyer. Finally, the Grifter - selling $3000 courses on "AI prompting" to people who think they can skip learning fundamentals. Spoiler alert: if your entire business model is "type sentences into ChatGPT," you're not building a moat, you're building a sandcastle at high tide. The punchline? All three are getting "Paywalled" - because OpenAI's API costs add up faster than AWS bills on a misconfigured Lambda function. Welcome to the future where you pay per token to avoid learning syntax.

Someone asks for the Bash reference manual and gets hit with an absolute unit of a URL pointing to some obscure government PDF buried in the justice.gov domain. Because nothing says "user-friendly documentation" like a 73-character filepath that looks like it was generated by a random number generator in 2009. The cardinal's aggressive response perfectly captures the energy of Linux veterans who've memorized these cryptic paths and will absolutely roast you for not knowing them. Meanwhile, the smaller bird's "whoa." is all of us trying to process that someone actually has this URL memorized and ready to deploy as a weapon. The real joke? That URL probably doesn't even work anymore, but the cardinal doesn't care. It's about sending a message: RTFM, but make it intimidating.

JavaScript's type coercion strikes again. Someone tried to compute the Fibonacci sequence but forgot that adding strings together doesn't do math—it does concatenation. So instead of getting 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, you get "1", "11", "111", "1111"... just progressively longer strings of ones. It's like watching someone try to do arithmetic with duct tape. The best part? The code probably ran without errors. JavaScript just silently nodded and said "yeah, this seems fine."

Behold, the architectural masterpiece of software development: a balcony that literally leads to NOWHERE but somehow holds up the entire building. You stare at it in absolute terror because removing it might cause the whole thing to collapse into a heap of runtime errors and broken dependencies. That random function you wrote at 3 AM? The one with the cryptic variable name "temp_fix_2_final_ACTUAL"? Yeah, it serves no visible purpose, defies all logic, and violates every SOLID principle known to humanity. But the SECOND you delete it, your entire application implodes spectacularly. So there it sits, mocking you from your codebase, a monument to your past sins and questionable life choices. Welcome to legacy code, where nothing makes sense but everything is load-bearing. Touch nothing. Question nothing. Just slowly back away and pretend you never saw it.

While everyone's out here having a full-blown brawl over React vs Vue, microservices vs monoliths, and whether tabs or spaces will end civilization, there's some guy peacefully eating his lunch while maintaining a COBOL system that's been running since before the internet had opinions. The real kicker? That COBOL dev is probably making bank because there are like 12 people left on Earth who know how to maintain those ancient mainframes that still process 95% of ATM transactions and credit card swaps. Banks literally can't afford to let these systems die, so they're stuck paying premium rates for developers who learned programming when punch cards were still a thing. Meanwhile, the "modern stack" crowd is too busy fighting about which JavaScript framework will be obsolete next Tuesday to notice they're reinventing the wheel for the 47th time this year. Job security? That COBOL dev has it in spades while the rest of us are one npm audit away from an existential crisis.

The evolution of text editors told through the lens of broken friendships. We've all been there—you started coding with Notepad++ like it was your ride-or-die, then Sublime Text came along with its sleek UI and multi-cursor magic, and suddenly you're acting like Notepad++ never existed. Now Sublime Text is getting the same treatment because VS Code (represented by that orange Sublime logo) showed up with IntelliSense, integrated terminal, extensions for literally everything, and—oh yeah—it's free. No more "unregistered" popup guilt trips. The crossed-out Notepad++ at the bottom really drives home the point: it's not just replaced, it's erased from memory . The text editor graveyard is real, and we're all guilty of moving on without looking back. RIP to the tools that taught us to code before we got fancy with our IDEs.

The 'W' key is completely obliterated while everything else looks pristine. Why? Because real developers don't back up, don't retreat, and certainly don't learn from their mistakes. Just keep pushing forward into production with that half-baked code and see what happens. Debugging? Nah. Refactoring? Never heard of her. Just W-W-W-W-W your way through life until something breaks spectacularly. The determination in those anime eyes says it all: "I will not Ctrl+Z my way out of this. I will not git revert. I will simply continue writing more code on top of my bugs until they become features." That's the spirit of a true 10x developer right there—moving forward at all costs, leaving a trail of technical debt and confused teammates in your wake.

Installing VSCode via Snap on Linux is like choosing to debug in production on a Friday afternoon—technically possible, but you'll regret every second of it. The performance is sluggish, the integration is janky, and suddenly your editor takes 10 seconds to open a file. It's the kind of mistake that haunts you during every coding session afterward. Snap packages are containerized apps that sound great in theory but often deliver a subpar experience compared to native installations. VSCode via Snap is notorious for being slower, having clipboard issues, and generally feeling like you're coding through molasses. Veterans know: always grab the .deb package or use the official Microsoft repo. The debugging session reference? That's the painful 4-hour journey of uninstalling Snap VSCode, cleaning up the mess it left behind, and reinstalling it properly while your deadline looms closer.