Lemme Stick To Old Ways

The desperate plea of every developer trying to get a straight answer from an AI. That moment when you've spent 3 hours crafting the perfect prompt, only to receive a hallucinated API response that would make a JSON validator commit seppuku. The modern equivalent of "I'll do your homework if you just show me how to solve this one problem." Except now your mortgage payment depends on getting valid data without a single curly brace out of place.

The background is literally screaming "AI AI AI AI" while the foreground shows the letters "AI" in giant orange font. It's like when your product manager asks "Can we add AI to this?" and your codebase is just a glorified if-statement. The confused expression perfectly captures that moment when someone asks if you're using "real AI" in your project and you're mentally calculating whether your nested conditional statements count as machine learning. Bonus points if you've ever renamed a variable to "ai_something" just to satisfy stakeholders.

The face every senior dev makes when some kid who just discovered "Hello World" starts dropping hot takes about the industry. That classic list of naïve programming opinions is what we veterans call "peak Dunning-Kruger." Sure, LeetCode will definitely prepare you for building enterprise systems that handle millions of users. And yes, we senior engineers just type "how to code good" into Google faster than juniors. Nothing says "I've never built anything real" quite like claiming backend is just "hitting APIs." Eight years of experience? More like eight minutes on a JavaScript tutorial.

Ah, the ultimate job security plan! Turns out the one person AI won't replace is the colleague who contributes absolutely nothing. That sweet spot where you're so useless that even automation can't justify the ROI of replacing you. It's like finding a bug so bizarre that QA just labels it as "expected behavior" and moves on. The perfect defense against technological unemployment isn't upskilling—it's strategic incompetence!

The true superpower of developers isn't writing code—it's surviving vendor hell. While everyone's panicking about AI taking our jobs, they're forgetting the eternal constant of tech: third-party vendors with documentation that's either fantasy fiction or written by someone who never used their own product. Those five desperate emails you sent last week? Still unread. That support ticket from last month? "Under investigation." Meanwhile your PM is wondering why that "simple integration" is taking so long. Good luck replacing us with AI when even humans can't figure out what the hell your API is supposed to do.

The ancient developer ritual: boss announces a new app, teammates immediately suggest AI tools, and the one guy who remembers what programming is gets defenestrated for his troubles. Apparently suggesting actual coding is now a capital offense in tech meetings. What's next, suggesting we read documentation?