Fine, I'll Do It Myself

Ah, the eternal dev dream: "Can AI just handle all this data conversion crap so I don't have to?" Meanwhile, every developer who's spent weeks building custom parsers for legacy government PDFs is quietly sobbing in the corner. The real treasury isn't money—it's the sanity we lost converting Excel to JSON. Pro tip: if you want to feel true pain, try parsing a PDF that was originally a scanned document from 1997 that someone converted to Word and then back to PDF again.

Tech companies: "Our revolutionary AI will transform your workflow and boost productivity!" *five minutes later* "How dare you use AI to solve our fizzbuzz test? That's cheating!" The corporate hypocrisy meter just broke. They want you to buy their AI products but heaven forbid you use them to bypass their archaic hiring rituals.

When your resume is just a list of tech companies that imploded right after you left. Nothing suspicious here, folks. Just a trail of digital catastrophes following this person like a shadow. Netflix sports streaming that doesn't exist yet, CrowdStrike's Windows update disaster, Google's Gemini historical figure fiasco, Silicon Valley Bank collapse, and FTX's crypto meltdown. Hiring managers will definitely not notice this pattern of working at companies right before they face existential crises. Solid career strategy - join, collect paycheck, abandon ship, repeat.

The railroad tracks of progress have certainly gotten more complex! On the left, we have the traditional straight-line coding path—simple, predictable, and takes you 5 hours to reach a single destination. On the right, the AI-assisted coding multiverse with infinite possibilities, chaotic intersections, and enough track switches to give a train conductor an existential crisis. Sure, you'll build your app in 5 minutes with AI, but then spend the next 4 hours and 55 minutes figuring out which of the 47 different generated solutions actually works without summoning digital Cthulhu to your codebase. The real question: are we moving faster or just creating more impressive train wrecks?

The duality of modern coding life. First panel: "OMG, GitHub Copilot is free in VS Code?!" *frantically puts on glasses to see clearly* Second panel: "Wait... my code is free for GitHub Copilot?" *realization sets in* Remember when we used to worry about other devs stealing our code? Now we're feeding the AI overlords our precious algorithms so they can regurgitate them to junior devs who'll get paid more than us. The circle of tech life, folks.

The eternal struggle of being the tech person at a social gathering. There you are, trying to enjoy dinner with your spouse when suddenly their friends ambush you with questions about some obscure tech they heard about on a podcast. DeepSeek-R1 is actually a large language model (like ChatGPT's cousin), but to non-tech people, it might as well be alien technology. Meanwhile, your spouse has seen this movie before and knows exactly how the next hour of conversation will go—you reluctantly explaining machine learning concepts while your food gets cold. Ten years in the industry and I'm still the default tech support/explainer at every gathering. The dog represents my inner self—just wanting to be petted and fed treats instead of discussing transformer architectures over appetizers.