Idk Man It Just Works

The tech industry's relationship with the word "open" is like that ex who said they wanted an "open relationship" but actually meant "I want to see other people while you stay committed." On the left, we've got "Open" VPNs with fine print that would make a lawyer blush: "free" (after you pay), "unlimited" (for exactly two people), and source code you can view from such a distance you'll need the James Webb telescope. And then there's "Open" AI on the right—about as open as Fort Knox during a security drill. "Open research" (coming never), "open models" (just trust us, bro), and an "open culture" where sharing is strictly forbidden. After 15 years in tech, I've learned that "open" is corporate-speak for "we'll keep it open until we've captured enough market share to slam the door shut." Classic bait-and-switch, now with 100% more paywalls!

Congratulations, humanity. We've spent decades perfecting calculators—devices with the singular purpose of doing math correctly—only to replace them with AI that guesses answers like a hungover liberal arts major. Language models see "2+2" and think "hmm, these symbols often appear near '4' in text, so that's probably right" instead of, you know, adding . It's like building a toaster that occasionally decides your bread would be better as soup. The irony is exquisite—we've created systems smart enough to write poetry but too "creative" to remember that math has actual rules.

The entire AI economy balancing on the tiny ball of "reasoning LLMs" while desperate developers beg their models to just return valid JSON without screwing up the syntax is painfully real. Six months of development, millions in VC funding, and your entire product crashes because an AI can't remember to close a curly brace. Meanwhile, VCs are throwing cash at anything with "agentic" in the pitch deck. The modern tech equivalent of building a mansion on a toothpick foundation and wondering why it keeps falling over.

The modern freelance developer's business model in its purest form. Get paid $20 to fix a bug, immediately spend half of it on a Copilot subscription that probably wrote the buggy code in the first place, and pocket a measly $10 profit. The smug anime girl just makes it perfect – that face when you realize you're essentially paying GitHub to help you fix the mess their AI created. It's the circle of tech life: create problems, sell solutions, repeat.

That moment when it hits you—your entire coding career has been reduced to "vibes" since ChatGPT arrived. No more grinding through Stack Overflow at 3 AM; now it's just "Hey AI, fix this mess" and hoping for the best. Your carefully cultivated programming skills? Just expensive intuition for prompting. Your CS degree? Just fancy paper to frame next to your "I used to write my own code" participation trophy.

The tech industry's selective standards are painfully real. They'll reject a fresh grad for not implementing some theoretical O(n) algorithm they'll never use again, but will happily throw billions at AI models running on brute-force compute that would make any algorithm professor have an existential crisis. For those who don't know, O(n) refers to linear time complexity - basically how efficiently an algorithm scales. Companies obsess over this in interviews then proceed to ignore efficiency completely when it comes to their shiny new toys. Next time you're rejected for not optimizing a binary tree traversal fast enough, just remember - somewhere a data center is melting the polar ice caps to generate a cat picture.