Never Using It Again

Remember when programmers were basically digital demigods who could craft mission-critical code for lunar missions without breaking a sweat? Yeah, me neither. Today's reality is more like staring blankly at a screen, asking ChatGPT to fix our semicolon errors while we're trapped in Vim because apparently that's still a thing in 2024. And let's not forget the classic "fix one bug, spawn three more" - nature's way of keeping us humble. The golden age of programming never existed. We just replaced "I don't know how to do this" with "I don't know how to ask AI to do this for me."

That moment when you realize the "simple" Tower of Hanoi puzzle that entertains toddlers has become the new benchmark for exposing AI limitations. Programmers have been sweating over this recursive nightmare for decades, and now we're watching advanced LLMs fail at it too. Nothing quite validates your career choices like seeing a $100 billion AI model struggle with the same puzzle that made you question your life decisions during your first algorithms class. The screaming red face is just our collective internal monologue when debugging recursive functions.

Standing at the crossroads of decision, a developer faces the harsh truth about AI-generated code. GPT-5 promised the architectural equivalent of the Sistine Chapel but delivered a beautiful disaster instead. The elegantly refactored codebase looks magnificent on paper—all shiny patterns and clever abstractions—but runs with the grace of a three-legged elephant. It's the coding equivalent of building a Ferrari with cardboard parts. Stunning to look at, completely useless in practice. Yet we keep coming back for more punishment, don't we? Because deep down, we're all suckers for beautiful code, even when it spectacularly fails to compile.

THE ABSOLUTE STATE OF MODERN PROGRAMMING! 😭 Look at us, the so-called "tech geniuses" of our generation, reduced to begging AI overlords to fix our punctuation! I'm literally sitting here at 2AM, staring into the void, wondering if my entire career has come down to asking ChatGPT "pretty please add the semicolon I was too lazy to type." The semicolon - that tiny punctuation mark standing between me and functional code - and I've outsourced even THAT responsibility! Next thing you know, I'll be asking it to breathe for me because manual respiration seems like such a chore! The future is here, and it's pathetically hilarious!

When you ask an AI for help, it's like ordering water at a fancy restaurant where the waiter has a severe case of malicious compliance. You want a simple glass of water? Here's watermelon, watercress salad, and water garlic bread! No, you say? Fine, here's MULTIPLE waters! Still not right? How about ONE water... literally labeled "ONE WATER." And just when you think it can't get worse, you ask for the bill and suddenly you're getting scuba gear and a globe. The AI heard "bill" and thought "diving bill" and "global bill." Meanwhile, your wallet is having a panic attack because apparently misunderstanding simple requests costs $70. This is exactly why Stack Overflow exists—at least humans tell you you're stupid in a straightforward way.

The ultimate statistical irony: a bell curve meme about bell curves that perfectly follows... a bell curve. You've got the low-IQ folks who think bell curves are funny because "haha, pretty graph go brrr," the high-IQ intellectuals who appreciate bell curves for the exact same reason, and the middle-of-the-curve galaxy brains screaming "BAN BELL CURVES!!1!" with the intensity of someone who just discovered their entire codebase uses tabs instead of spaces. The distribution of opinions about bell curves literally forms a bell curve, and that's the kind of recursive humor that keeps me going through sprint planning meetings.