Can We Start Calling AI By Its Real Name

Remember when your code buddy was just a rubber duck? Now we've got AI assistants responding to our desperate 3AM comments with heartfelt "Love you bro" messages. Nothing says modern programming quite like having an emotional exchange with a TypeScript file at monster-manager.ts while your real friends are asleep. The three-second "thinking" pause before the response is just *chef's kiss* - just enough time to make you forget you're talking to a machine that would absolutely ghost you if its server went down.

Sure, your AI agent built that app in 5 minutes, but good luck maintaining that spaghetti junction of code six months from now. The left shows traditional development—straightforward, predictable, maybe boring but gets you where you need to go. The right is modern AI development—looks impressive with all those fancy switches and signals, but one wrong move and your train derails into dependency hell. I've seen enough "AI-accelerated" projects crash and burn to know that speed now means tech debt later. The complexity always comes due.

That moment when it hits you—your entire coding career has been reduced to "vibes" since ChatGPT arrived. No more grinding through Stack Overflow at 3 AM; now it's just "Hey AI, fix this mess" and hoping for the best. Your carefully cultivated programming skills? Just expensive intuition for prompting. Your CS degree? Just fancy paper to frame next to your "I used to write my own code" participation trophy.

Oh, the sweet innocence of "I made a website with ChatGPT" followed by sending a local file path instead of a URL. That's like telling someone you're a chef because you microwaved a Hot Pocket. What we're witnessing here is the beautiful collision of Dunning-Kruger effect and file system confusion. Our friend thinks they've launched the next Facebook when they've really just saved an HTML file to their downloads folder. No server, no hosting, just pure unbridled confidence. The Windows file path is just *chef's kiss* perfect - nothing says "I'm a web developer" like trying to share C:\Users\ben\Downloads\index.html through iMessage.

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.

Remember that existential dread when ChatGPT dropped? Programmers lined up at the gallows, convinced our jobs were toast. Meanwhile, mathematicians are just sipping coffee like, "Welcome to the club, rookies." They've been watching calculators steal their thunder since the 70s and somehow survived to tell the tale. The career apocalypse is always "just around the corner" until you realize most tools just handle the boring parts while we move on to more interesting problems. History doesn't repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.