AI Won't Fix Your Incompetence

The eternal struggle of being the tech person at a social gathering. There you are, trying to enjoy dinner with your spouse when suddenly their friends ambush you with questions about some obscure tech they heard about on a podcast. DeepSeek-R1 is actually a large language model (like ChatGPT's cousin), but to non-tech people, it might as well be alien technology. Meanwhile, your spouse has seen this movie before and knows exactly how the next hour of conversation will go—you reluctantly explaining machine learning concepts while your food gets cold. Ten years in the industry and I'm still the default tech support/explainer at every gathering. The dog represents my inner self—just wanting to be petted and fed treats instead of discussing transformer architectures over appetizers.

The classic bait-and-switch of AI development! First panel: "I love being an AI driven developer" sounds impressive—you're at the cutting edge of tech, working with sophisticated neural networks and machine learning algorithms. Second panel: "I get to work with models all day"... and there's the punchline. It's not about elegant mathematical models or groundbreaking algorithms—it's just endless prompt engineering, debugging hallucinations, and begging ChatGPT to format your JSON correctly for the 47th time today. The facepalm says it all. We've gone from writing code to writing increasingly desperate pleas to language models.

Modern programming is just AI shopping. Why solve a problem yourself when you can make five different AIs race to solve it for you? The real skill isn't writing code anymore—it's knowing which AI's hallucinations are least likely to crash in production. The "hit run on all five" part is where the true chaos begins. Nothing says "I trust my code" like throwing five different AI solutions at the wall and seeing which one sticks. Bonus points if you don't actually understand any of them but confidently present the winner in your next code review. The "like a psychopath" is just chef's kiss perfect. Because what's more psychotic than spending 3 hours asking AIs the same question when you could have just written the damn function yourself in 20 minutes?

Management just discovered AI agents exist and now they think every developer should be orchestrating a swarm of them for maximum productivity. Meanwhile, you're sitting there knowing full well that these "agents" are just glorified autocomplete with delusions of grandeur. The reality? Most AI coding agents hallucinate more than a sleep-deprived junior dev on their third energy drink. They confidently generate code that looks right, sounds right, but is fundamentally broken in ways that'll take you twice as long to debug than if you'd just written it yourself. But sure, let's all pretend we're using them while we actually just write the code the old-fashioned way and nod along in the standup. Classic disconnect between what management reads in their LinkedIn feed and what actually works in production.

Behold the great decline of our noble profession. We went from muscle-bound legends who wrote code without AI crutches and built entire games in Assembly (because apparently pain is character-building) to modern keyboard jockeys who can't center a div without consulting Google for the 47th time today. The golden age programmer fixed memory leaks by hand, while we're over here begging ChatGPT to fix our syntax errors like it's our personal code therapist. And let's not forget the programmer trapped in Vim since 2018 because :q! is apparently harder to remember than differential calculus. The final insult? We fix one bug and create three more. It's not a development cycle, it's a pyramid scheme.

The traffic light is literally hanging by a thread but still functioning—just like that spaghetti code you wrote at 3 AM with 17 nested if-statements and zero comments. Sure, it violates every engineering principle known to mankind, but the unit tests pass! That red light stopping traffic is the digital equivalent of your monstrosity somehow preventing production crashes while your tech lead silently weeps during code review.