Expectation vs. AI Reality

Ah, the beautiful dance of prompt engineering! This is what happens when you try to get an AI to generate a specific movie scene but keep hitting content policy walls. The user starts with a simple request for a Samuel L. Jackson meme, and watches in horror as the AI keeps multiplying characters with each attempt like it's running some bizarre cloning experiment. This is basically modern programming in 2024 - spending hours trying to phrase your request juuuust right so the AI doesn't hallucinate an entire cast reunion when you just wanted one angry dude with a gun. The final result? A perfect example of how "prompt engineering" is just fancy talk for "begging the computer to do what you actually want instead of what it thinks you want."

Ah, the Gartner Hype Cycle - tech's emotional rollercoaster! Right now we're all riding that sweet, sweet ChatGPT high at "Peak of Inflated Expectations" where everyone thinks AI will solve everything from debugging your code to fixing your love life. Just wait for that "Trough of Disillusionment" when we realize it still can't figure out why your code works in dev but crashes in production. The real fun begins when some manager inevitably says "Let's use AI to rewrite our entire codebase!" and then blames the junior dev when it hallucinates semicolons in Python.

The modern dev dependency crisis in full display! Remember when we used to actually write code instead of prompting AI for solutions? Now it's all "Hey ChatGPT, implement a binary search tree" while our actual coding muscles atrophy. The mannequin perfectly represents that dev who freezes up when GitHub Copilot goes down for maintenance. Pure panic. Meanwhile, the rest of us dinosaurs who learned to code before AI assistants are just watching the chaos unfold with a mix of amusement and existential dread. Evolution is brutal.

The classic tech panic bait-and-switch! First half: "AI is coming for your jobs, web devs! DSA knowledge? Useless. MERN stack? Dead. Only learn ML and chase whatever shiny new tech appears on the horizon!" Then the punchline drops: "The more terrified everyone is, the fewer people will compete for jobs... which means more job security for me ." It's the programming equivalent of telling kids the ice cream truck only plays music when it's out of ice cream. Pure psychological warfare disguised as career advice!

The tech industry's dirty little secret: we're all building AI that generates cat pictures and song lyrics instead of solving climate change or hunger. Why? Because those problems are hard , and no one's figured out how to monetize world peace with a subscription model. Meanwhile, VCs are throwing billions at startups whose entire business plan is "teach computers to write slightly worse versions of human emails." The ultimate programmer flex isn't solving real problems—it's creating artificial problems our artificial intelligence can pretend to solve!

Content in Linkedin You appeared in 367 searches this week Woah. So where's my job?