How Many Rs In Strawberry Again?

The modern developer's apocalypse: your code is on fire, production is crashing, and ChatGPT just responded with "I'm sorry, but I don't have enough context to debug your specific issue." Meanwhile you're just sitting there, surrounded by flames, eerily calm like SpongeBob, because this is the third time this week and you've transcended panic into a state of zen-like acceptance.

Ah, the sweet taste of accidental technical credibility. Nothing says "I'm a real developer" quite like having ChatGPT write HTML for you while someone peeks at your screen. The crying emoji is just chef's kiss perfect—that moment when you realize you've accidentally joined a club you have no qualifications for. Welcome to modern tech, where the line between "knowing what you're doing" and "knowing how to prompt an AI" gets blurrier by the day. The nonprofit coordinator is living the dream we're all secretly afraid of—being exposed as the impostors we feel like.

Nothing says "I'm a serious developer" quite like dropping $3000 on a PC just to run VS Code and Chrome. The unholy matrimony of NVIDIA and Ryzen—where your GPU costs more than your car payment and your CPU has more cores than you have meaningful relationships. Meanwhile, your code still crashes because you forgot a semicolon. The modern dev's power couple: enough computing strength to simulate the universe, primarily used to run npm install and watch YouTube tutorials on the side.

The tech industry's current obsession with slapping AI onto products is perfectly captured here. Some poor developer expressing their hatred for AI is immediately surrounded by corporate goons wielding their "tasty AI integration" like it's the solution to everything. Meanwhile, the developer's reaching for what appears to be a shotgun - because sometimes turning it off and on again just isn't enough of a fix. The real innovation would be a product that doesn't mention AI at all.

Ah, the modern developer's workflow. Empty try block, followed by a catch that just calls OpenAI to fix whatever broke. Why debug your own code when you can outsource your incompetence to an AI? Next up: a ChatGPT plugin that automatically adds this snippet to all your repositories. Efficiency through surrender.

Ah, the classic bell curve of AI anxiety. The folks at the low end of the IQ spectrum are blissfully confident they can't be replaced because they don't understand what's coming. The geniuses at the high end know they're safe because they're the ones building the AI overlords. Meanwhile, the rest of us in the middle—just smart enough to understand the threat but not brilliant enough to be irreplaceable—are sweating bullets. This is basically the tech industry's version of "ignorance is bliss" meets "knowledge is power," with the vast majority of us stuck in purgatory. Twenty years in this field and I'm still not sure if I should be learning to code better or learning to make coffee for the robots.