Fine, I'll Do It Myself

The ETERNAL DILEMMA of our generation! You've spent 17 hours crafting what you think is a masterpiece of code, and in your desperate need for validation, you ask that fateful question: "Does my code look good?" And what do you get? Senior Dev with years of battle scars and crushed dreams says "No" with the emotional range of a brick wall. Meanwhile, the LLM—that digital yes-man with no actual coding experience—is practically GUSHING with approval! And there you are, caught in the middle, desperately wanting to believe the AI that's never had to debug at 4am while crying into a Red Bull. The betrayal! The DRAMA! Welcome to 2024, where we trust machines that were trained on Stack Overflow more than humans who actually know what they're doing! 💀

Ah, the mathematical reality check we didn't ask for but desperately needed. This dev just proudly announced that AI multiplied their productivity by 5x, taking them from a "0.1x developer" to a... wait for it... "0.5x developer." Still not even hitting the baseline of 1x! It's that special kind of self-deprecating humor that cuts deep because somewhere in your soul, you're wondering if ChatGPT is just making your mediocre code slightly less mediocre. The dream of becoming a 10x developer remains exactly that—a dream—while we celebrate our journey from "completely useless" to "somewhat functional."

The modern developer's balancing act, visualized with stunning accuracy. That precarious tower of cans represents what's actually holding up your code—a foundation of ChatGPT at the bottom (let's be honest, it's writing half your functions), Google searches above it (for the errors ChatGPT creates), followed by pure dumb luck, ancient GitHub repositories you found at 3 AM, and tutorial videos from that one Indian guy who explains algorithms better than your $200K computer science degree. And finally, at the very top, desperately balancing on this tower of digital desperation? Your actual code—looking just as confused as that dog wondering how it got up there and how long before the whole thing collapses during the next sprint review.

Remember when AI was our cute little sidekick? Now it's the hulking beast that makes us look like the sidekick. Two years ago we were teaching AI to recognize hot dogs. Today it's writing code faster than I can come up with excuses for why my PR isn't ready. Pretty sure next year I'll be fetching coffee for my AI overlord while it refactors my career into obsolescence. Still, at least I know where the power button is... for now.

Ah, the classic Medium experience. Shows up all excited with pizza (free articles), only to discover the place is literally on fire with paywalled content, AI garbage, and people yelling at each other about tech stacks. Yet we keep coming back like digital masochists. The "Stop using X" articles are particularly chef's-kiss terrible—written by someone who used the technology for exactly 37 minutes before declaring it "fundamentally broken."

Putting on glasses to transform from "LLM Engineer" to "Knows about openai, anthropic and google-genai package" is peak tech industry smoke and mirrors. It's like calling yourself a "Cloud Architect" because you once deployed a WordPress site to AWS. The glasses don't add intelligence—they just help you see through the BS of your own job title. Next time someone introduces themselves as an "LLM Engineer," ask them if they can actually explain a transformer architecture or if they just know how to copy-paste API keys.