Copy-Paste Driven Development

So you pitch your AI startup to VCs: "We're disrupting the industry with revolutionary machine learning!" They respond: "Cool, here's $50 million in funding to build it." Meanwhile, your actual tech stack is just OpenAI's API with some fancy CSS on top. The entire AI economy is basically investors throwing money at founders who then immediately hand it over to OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google for API credits. It's a beautiful circular economy where the only guaranteed winners are the companies actually training the models. The rest of us are just expensive middleware with pitch decks.

You know that sinking feeling when you casually run git add . and suddenly realize you just staged 47GB of raw training data, node_modules, and probably your entire .env file? Now you're watching your terminal crawl through uploading gigabytes to GitHub while your upload speed decides to cosplay as dial-up internet. The "51 years" is barely an exaggeration when you're pushing datasets that should've been in .gitignore from day one. Pro tip: always update your .gitignore BEFORE the git add, not after you've committed to your terrible life choices. And if you've already pushed? Time to learn about git filter-branch or BFG Repo-Cleaner, which is basically the "oh no" button for git repos.

When your spouse couldn't care less about your AI obsession, but suddenly everyone at dinner wants to know about DeepSeek-R1! 😂 That awkward moment when you've been geeking out about the latest large language model for weeks at home to zero interest, and then BAM—your wife's friends actually want to hear your tech rambles! Finally, your moment to shine as the resident AI nerd has arrived! *frantically remembers all those GitHub stars and benchmark scores you memorized*

Copilot: "I executed the Python code" but forgot the actual code part! Classic AI assistant move - all results, zero implementation. That's like a chef saying "I cooked the meal, here's your empty plate!" The timestamp is there, but where's the datetime.now().strftime() magic that made it happen? Developers staring at this response are left to figure out the datetime formatting incantations themselves. The irony of an AI coding assistant that skips the most important part - the code!

Tech companies promising "democratized AI for everyone" until you ask about pricing is the tech industry's oldest bait and switch. Sure, they're "being honest" about making AI available—just conveniently forgetting to mention it'll cost you the equivalent of a car payment. And that awkward moment when the customer actually thanks them for the privilege of being financially drained? Pure Stockholm syndrome that every product manager dreams of.

The existential dread of leaving your IDE unattended for 5 minutes only to return and find your machine compiling Skynet. That moment when npm install decides to rebuild the entire dependency tree because you accidentally typed "y" while half asleep. Your computer's gone from "Hello World" to "Hello New World Order" real quick. The scariest part? You don't even have admin privileges in this new relationship.