At Least They Pay Well

Ah, the classic bell curve of AI anxiety. The folks at the low end of the IQ spectrum are blissfully confident they can't be replaced because they don't understand what's coming. The geniuses at the high end know they're safe because they're the ones building the AI overlords. Meanwhile, the rest of us in the middle—just smart enough to understand the threat but not brilliant enough to be irreplaceable—are sweating bullets. This is basically the tech industry's version of "ignorance is bliss" meets "knowledge is power," with the vast majority of us stuck in purgatory. Twenty years in this field and I'm still not sure if I should be learning to code better or learning to make coffee for the robots.

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 perfect comparison doesn't exi— oh wait, it does! "Vibe coding" with AI tools is basically gambling with extra steps. You trade real programming skills for the dopamine rush of watching the cursor blink while an AI model hallucinates your next function. That feeling when you're absolutely convinced the next prompt will fix everything is eerily similar to thinking your next pull on the slot machine will make you rich. Meanwhile, actual software engineers are watching prompt engineers with the same expression casino dealers have when someone explains their "foolproof system." And that last row? Pure gold. Nothing quite captures the existential crisis of modern development like realizing you just spent 4 hours crafting the perfect prompt when you could've just written the damn code yourself.

Getting that baby started on backpropagation before they can even propagate backward out of the room. Gotta secure that AI engineering job by age 3. The kid's already debugging neural network architectures while the rest of us are still trying to center a div. In 20 years they'll be creating sentient AI while we're still arguing about tabs vs spaces.

OH MY GOD, LOOK AT THAT CHART! Grok with 25 updates while everyone else is barely crawling with 2-3? Honey, that's not "evolving faster" – that's the digital equivalent of throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks! 💅 When your app needs TWENTY-FIVE updates in two weeks, you're not winning the AI race – you're winning the "our first version was a catastrophic dumpster fire" award! The rest of those companies are just sitting there like "maybe test before release?" But who has time for that when you're busy being REVOLUTIONARY?! The absolute DRAMA of bragging about how many times you had to fix your broken toy. Next up: "My car is the fastest because I've replaced the engine 25 times this month!"

Oh honey, look at these programmers having their little existential crisis over ChatGPT! Meanwhile, mathematicians are standing there like the seasoned gallows veterans they are, rolling their eyes SO HARD they can see their own brain. 💅 Calculators literally DECIMATED mathematical jobs decades ago, and these math wizards just adapted and found more complex problems to solve. But sure, programmers, keep clutching those mechanical keyboards while sobbing into your Stack Overflow bookmarks! First automation rodeo, sweetie?