From BASIC To Billions: The AI Evolution Nobody Saw Coming

Corporate tech in a nutshell. Some executive burns through millions on AI "innovations" that are basically expensive tech demos destined for the graveyard. Meanwhile, the kid who'll inherit this mess someday is already recognizing the corporate cycle of wasted resources. The real kicker? Those hundreds of proof-of-concepts probably could've been one solid product if someone had just said "no" to the next shiny AI buzzword. But that wouldn't look good on the quarterly innovation report, would it?

The programmer's journey to enlightenment, visualized as expanding brain memes. Starting with the lazy "just ask ChatGPT" approach, then graduating to StackOverflow searches (the industry standard). But true galaxy brains dig deeper—from ancient forum threads to dusty textbooks to ISO standards documents. And for those problems that make you question reality itself? Track down the language creator's hometown for clues, or the nuclear option—talk to his mom. "Yes Mrs. Stroustrup, your son's multiple inheritance implementation is giving me nightmares again." The irony? We've all done the bottom one at 3am when nothing else works. Desperation breeds creativity.

Autocomplete tools looking at your code like pawn shop owners evaluating your junk. "Best we can do is predict next token" is the programming equivalent of "I'll give you $5 for that family heirloom." Sure, GitHub Copilot might suggest something brilliant, but usually it's just confidently predicting you want another semicolon or closing bracket. The AI revolution in coding is basically just sophisticated guesswork with better marketing.

That face when the junior dev confidently explains an AI-generated pull request that's 90% hallucinated features and 10% actual code. The smug little smile says it all: "I totally understand what's happening here" while internally panicking about what await Promise.resolve(undefined).then(() => Math.random() > 0.5 ? 'success' : throw new Error('oops')) is supposed to accomplish. The code review is scheduled for 3pm and Stack Overflow is already open in 17 tabs.

Oh snap! The AI bubble just got popped harder than my dreams of writing bug-free code on the first try! 🎯 After years of hype cycles and buzzword bingo, we've reached that beautiful moment of clarity where someone finally said the quiet part out loud. All those fancy "AI solutions" your boss keeps pushing? Just regular algorithms wearing expensive suits and practicing elevator pitches! It's like when you rename your "if-else" function to "DecisionIntelligenceEngine™" and suddenly your startup is worth $10 million. Pure magic! ✨

The eternal dance between developers and regex—a cryptic language that might as well be ancient runes. When ChatGPT spits out a working regex that looks like someone headbutted a keyboard, what do we do? Copy-paste that mystical incantation and back away slowly. It's the modern equivalent of summoning a demon—you don't need to understand the Latin, you just need the spell to work. And when it does? Pure dopamine. That smug satisfaction of solving a problem without actually understanding the solution is programming at its finest. Future you will hate present you when that regex breaks in six months. But that's a problem for future you, who is, quite frankly, a bit of a buzzkill anyway.