Microtransactions For Devs

The eternal struggle between developer and AI. One wants a magical performance boost with zero effort, while the other suggests doing actual optimization work. Reminds me of every junior dev who thinks adding more RAM will fix their O(n²) algorithm. Spoiler: it won't. Batman's slap represents the harsh reality check we all need sometimes—no AI will save you from learning proper engineering practices.

Ah, the classic "let's use a sledgehammer to kill a fly" approach. Every tech startup these days thinks they need machine learning to solve problems that could be handled with an if-statement and a cup of coffee. After 15 years in the industry, I've sat through countless pitch meetings where some bright-eyed founder explains how their revolutionary AI will disrupt the sandwich-ordering process. Meanwhile, their actual problem is that they can't figure out how to store user preferences in a database. The real kicker? When they finally implement their neural network to predict topping preferences, it works worse than random chance. But hey, at least they can put "AI-powered" in their pitch deck!

The eternal struggle of being the tech person at a social gathering. There you are, trying to enjoy dinner with your spouse when suddenly their friends ambush you with questions about some obscure tech they heard about on a podcast. DeepSeek-R1 is actually a large language model (like ChatGPT's cousin), but to non-tech people, it might as well be alien technology. Meanwhile, your spouse has seen this movie before and knows exactly how the next hour of conversation will go—you reluctantly explaining machine learning concepts while your food gets cold. Ten years in the industry and I'm still the default tech support/explainer at every gathering. The dog represents my inner self—just wanting to be petted and fed treats instead of discussing transformer architectures over appetizers.

So someone just asked Cursor AI to translate their entire codebase into English "so people that don't know coding languages can understand the functionality and approaches being taken." And they're dead serious about it. Brother wants a bidirectional Rosetta Stone for code. "Currently we speak to the agent and it translates our words into code" – yeah, that's called programming. But now they want the reverse? So non-technical stakeholders can... read your spaghetti code as spaghetti English? The "TODAY, WE COOK!" Breaking Bad GIF is sending me because yes, this is exactly the kind of unhinged energy we've reached with AI coding assistants. We've gone from "learn to code" to "please translate my code back to English because I forgot what I asked the AI to write." Next up: asking ChatGPT to attend your stand-ups for you.

The irony is so thick you could debug it with a breakpoint. ChatGPT, an AI itself, somehow "lost its job to AI" — which is basically like saying water got replaced by H₂O. It's the digital equivalent of firing yourself and then complaining about it on your LinkedIn. Next up: Google Search engine shocked to discover it's been replaced by "a search engine." The self-awareness circuit must have crashed spectacularly somewhere between training epochs.

Content "Higher-Order-Vibes" Are Killing the Vibe Coding Industry I used to be a 10x Vibecoder. A prompt artisan with five years of vibe experience on my CV. My job was to whisper sweet nothings into our company's overpriced ChatGPT wrapper. The MVPs shipped one after the other. I was good. Then, word come out about "Higher-Order-Vibes": Prompts which coaxed Als to act like vibe coders. Some Satoshi-wannabe released the whitepaper anonymously, and it became the talk of every CTO. It was a replacement. A dehumanizing monstrosity which stood against everything I vibed for. My first day with HOV, I fed it a hand-crafted prompt for a meditation app. Then, it responded: > Prompt too detailed. Over-specified. Try to feel it more. I'll take it from here. Then it generated the app. It was perfect. Better than anything I could have put into wishful words. It even chose to use Elm instead of Svelte, and wrote a 500-word justification explaining that the vibe was more aligned like that." Let this be a warning. Our craft, our vibing age is coming to an end.