At Least They Pay Well

The eternal struggle of modern development: StackOverflow tells you that you're absolutely wrong (with bonus downvotes and snarky comments), while ChatGPT cheerfully validates your terrible code that will probably explode in production. It's like choosing between the brutally honest friend who makes you cry and the yes-man who encourages you to wear that hideous outfit to an interview. The truth is somewhere in between, but who has time for nuance when you're trying to fix that bug before the deadline?

The digital ouroboros is complete. This code reads itself, asks GPT to improve it, overwrites itself with the AI's response, then executes the new version. It's basically code that tells AI "make me better" then immediately runs whatever the AI spits out. I've seen enough horror movies to know exactly how this ends. Some junior dev is going to run this, step away for coffee, and return to find their laptop has ordered itself RGB gaming peripherals and is writing a manifesto.

The classic "ChatGPT will make me rich" delusion meets reality. Someone asks their AI overlord to generate a million-dollar app with zero bugs, and you can practically see the existential crisis unfolding in real-time as they realize the output is... less than stellar. The contradiction is chef's kiss: "make me an app that makes $1M/month" + "don't make any mistakes" = asking AI to solve problems that actual billion-dollar companies with armies of engineers still can't crack. Meanwhile, ChatGPT probably just generated a todo list app with hardcoded credentials and SQL injection vulnerabilities. If getting rich was as easy as typing a prompt, we'd all be retired on a beach somewhere instead of debugging production at 3 AM. But hey, at least the AI-generated code compiles... sometimes.

The schadenfreude is palpable. Senior devs have watched this movie before—junior copies ChatGPT code, junior deploys ChatGPT code, production server bursts into flames. There's a special kind of satisfaction watching someone learn the hard way that AI doesn't understand edge cases or business logic. It's the circle of dev life: you either die a ChatGPT believer or live long enough to become the cackling senior who saw it coming.

The face of pure disappointment. Google's search algorithm used to return actual solutions from GeeksforGeeks, but now it's determined to show you AI-generated Medium articles hiding behind paywalls. It's like trading a working Swiss Army knife for a plastic spoon with "premium features." Next they'll suggest I debug production by asking my horoscope.

The duality of AI in the development lifecycle is painfully accurate. Junior devs are celebrating like they've discovered fire – "Look ma, no hands!" – while generating code they barely understand. Meanwhile, senior developers stare into the existential void as they're forced to review the AI-generated spaghetti mess. That thousand-yard stare says it all: "I've seen things... terrible things... like nested ternaries and 200-line functions named 'doStuff'." The circle of programming life continues – AI just made the mess arrive faster.