Brain Atrophy: The ChatGPT Effect

The stark reality of AI development! 🤣 At the top, we've got the cool, confident "Devs who use AI" looking all polished and ready to conquer the world with their fancy prompt engineering skills. Meanwhile, the poor souls actually building these AI systems are down there looking like they haven't slept since 2019, surrounded by empty bottles and existential dread. Nothing says "I understand the transformer architecture" quite like staring into the void at 4pm wondering if your neural network will ever converge! The contrast is BRUTAL - one group thinks they're tech wizards for asking ChatGPT to write their regex, while the other group is questioning their life choices after debugging hallucinations for the fifth straight day!

Ah, the classic machine learning joke that hits too close to home! Instead of having its own preferences, the ML algorithm just wants to know what everyone else is drinking—because that's literally how it works. Collaborative filtering in a nutshell. This is basically every recommendation system ever built: "I see you're a human with unique tastes and preferences. Have you considered liking exactly what everyone else likes?" Next thing you know, the algorithm is wearing the same outfit as all the other algorithms at the party.

If only AI was this simple. Two lines of code and boom—sentient machines ready to take over the world. Meanwhile, my actual ML models need 500GB of training data just to recognize a hotdog. That dusty MacBook screen really completes the "exhausted data scientist" aesthetic. Nothing says "I understand neural networks" like pretending you can just call machine.learn() and go grab coffee.

The AUDACITY of these AI models! 💅 Ask them anything slightly outside their training data and suddenly they transform into the most CONFIDENT FICTION AUTHORS on the planet! "Random bullshit go!!!" is literally their entire business strategy when cornered. It's the digital equivalent of that one friend who'd rather DIE than admit they don't know something. "What's the capital of Narnia? Oh it's OBVIOUSLY Aslanville, population 42 million, famous for its underwater skyscrapers." And they say it with their WHOLE CHEST too! 🙄

The iceberg metaphor is painfully accurate. After 15 years in the industry, I can confirm that typing out the actual code is the easy 10% that everyone sees. The other 90%? That's the soul-crushing existential void of figuring out what to code in the first place. AI can generate syntax all day long, but good luck getting it to understand the business logic buried in 47 conflicting Slack messages, 3 outdated Jira tickets, and that one crucial requirement your PM mentioned offhandedly during a coffee break last Tuesday.

Content The Self Taught "Serious" Programmer Starter Kit "Just learn assemblv" What the hell is a proof? "bro, you don't need math" Has zero professional experience Lacks basic computer architecture fundamentals despite praising its importance Very active in r/_programming Over emphasizes the importance of code editors and sneers at IDEs made with mematie