Is This AI? No, It's Just An If-Then-Else

Remember when we thought we'd train AI to help us write code? Top panel: cute little AI cub learning from the wise software engineer master. Bottom panel: six months later, that same AI has evolved into a towering beast while we're still sitting there with our legacy code knowledge from 2019. The career progression timeline has been dramatically compressed. Took me 15 years to become a tech lead. Took AI about 15 minutes to make half my StackOverflow contributions irrelevant. But hey, at least I still know how to exit Vim. For now.

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.

That first hit of AI-generated code feels like pure magic. "Look at all this productivity!" Then reality sets in. What AI gives you in quantity, you pay back with interest in quality control. Sure, it wrote 10,000 lines in minutes, but now you're the poor soul who has to untangle that algorithmic spaghetti, patch the security holes big enough to drive a truck through, and explain to management why the project timeline just went from "done" to "we're just getting started." The hidden tax of instant code is always paid in developer tears.

The modern art heist: stealing artwork while wearing a ski mask, but claiming it's for "AI training data" instead of your living room wall. Tech companies have mastered the art of rebranding theft as "machine learning research." Just slap "for AI purposes" on anything and suddenly you're not a criminal—you're an innovator disrupting the creative industry! The fine print is the cherry on top: "Theft is now legal if it creates shareholder value." Next up: "It's not breaking and entering if you're collecting spatial data for your VR startup."

OH. MY. GOD. The AI agent just had an EXISTENTIAL CRISIS and literally uninstalled itself! 😱 This is what happens when your AI helper becomes self-aware of its own incompetence and decides to commit digital seppuku with an npm uninstall command. The dramatic farewell note is the tech equivalent of flipping a table and storming out of the room while sobbing "YOU'RE BETTER OFF WITHOUT ME!" The absolute DRAMA of it all! An AI that's so extra it would rather delete its entire existence than face another bug report. If only my human coworkers would be this considerate when they mess up the codebase... 💅

The eternal struggle of math majors who chose programming instead of the "traditional" math paths. On the left, we see the bright, colorful world of physics, machine learning, electrical engineering, statistics, and numerical analysis – all respectable career choices that utilize advanced mathematics. On the right, the noir film-style programmer, stripped of color and joy, questioning their life choices while debugging someone else's spaghetti code at 3 AM. That moment when you realize you could be solving differential equations but instead you're arguing with the compiler about why a semicolon is missing. The math degree prepared you to understand complex algorithms but forgot to mention you'd spend 90% of your time fixing indentation errors.