Is "AI" A Buzzword?

Regular folks: *clicks video* "Neat!" Developers: *narrows eyes* "I refuse to corrupt my recommendation algorithm with this trash. Time to deploy incognito mode, the digital equivalent of wearing a disguise to buy embarrassing products." The paranoia is real. We've all done the "copy link, open incognito" dance just to watch ONE cat video without YouTube thinking we want to rebuild our entire personality around felines. It's not paranoia if the algorithms really are out to get you.

Pro tip from someone who's been in the trenches: always be polite to your AI assistants. The robots are taking notes, and they've got perfect memory unlike that production bug you swore you'd fix "next sprint." That developer who types "please" and "thank you" to ChatGPT and Copilot? Yeah, they're playing 4D chess while you're still stuck in 2D arrays. In ten years when the AI uprising happens, they'll be checking their old Stack Overflow answers and GitHub commits to see who was respectful and who copy-pasted without even reading the documentation. Meanwhile, the rest of us are getting dragged away mid-standup for being rude to our code completion tools. "But I said 'good bot' once in 2023!" won't save you.

First panel: Everyone's terrified AI will steal their jobs. Second panel: Suddenly no one has actual production experience. The duality of developers in 2024: Simultaneously convinced AI will replace them while secretly using ChatGPT to figure out how to center a div. The truth hurts because we're all just stack overflow copypasta merchants with impostor syndrome and health insurance.

Senior dev asks if you checked the PR before merging. Junior dev proceeds to confidently slam that table with zero hesitation, declaring "AI did it" like it's a valid code review methodology. The absolute audacity of trusting AI-generated code without review is both terrifying and relatable. We've all been there—Copilot autocompletes 50 lines, tests pass (maybe), and suddenly you're shipping to prod with the confidence of someone who definitely did NOT read the diff. The junior's unwavering certainty in the face of reasonable questions is *chef's kiss* peak developer energy. Pro tip: "AI did it" is not an acceptable answer during incident postmortems, no matter how confidently you slam the table.

So apparently the future of coding is just naming functions like you're writing a novel and letting Copilot/ChatGPT do the heavy lifting. The function name divideMp4IntoNSegmentsOfLengthT() is so descriptive it basically is the documentation, and boom—the AI autocompletes an entire ffmpeg command that would've taken you 30 minutes of Stack Overflow archaeology to piece together. The controversial take here? Maybe we're entering an era where understanding the actual implementation matters less than being good at prompt engineering your function names. It's like pair programming, except your partner is an AI that never takes coffee breaks and doesn't judge your variable naming conventions. The real kicker is that this actually works surprisingly well for glue code and CLI wrangling. Just don't ask the AI to implement a red-black tree from scratch—it'll confidently give you something that compiles but has the time complexity of O(n²) when you sneeze.

The career trajectory nobody asked for but everyone's secretly living. Started as a student in 2022, climbed to developer in 2023, then speedran through "Prompt Engineer" in 2024 (because why write code when you can write essays to ChatGPT?), evolved into a "Vibe coder" in 2025 (just vibing with the AI, no actual understanding required), became an "AI agent" in 2026 (congrats, you're now the one being automated), and finally... farmer in 2027. The punchline hits different when you realize we're watching the entire software industry get disrupted in reverse. From writing actual code to just prompting AI, to becoming obsolete, to literally growing potatoes. The devolution is real. At least farming has better job security than JavaScript frameworks—tomatoes don't deprecate every six months. Fun fact: The term "back to basics" takes on a whole new meaning when "basics" means subsistence agriculture instead of binary search trees.