Never Using It Again

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.

Corporate: "Can you spot the difference between a gold bar and a high-end GPU?" Developers in 2024: "They're the same picture." With GPUs costing as much as precious metals these days, training that fancy ML model might require a second mortgage. Remember when we just worried about RAM prices? Those were simpler times.

Oh, the sweet innocence of "I made a website with ChatGPT" followed by sending a local file path instead of a URL. That's like telling someone you're a chef because you microwaved a Hot Pocket. What we're witnessing here is the beautiful collision of Dunning-Kruger effect and file system confusion. Our friend thinks they've launched the next Facebook when they've really just saved an HTML file to their downloads folder. No server, no hosting, just pure unbridled confidence. The Windows file path is just *chef's kiss* perfect - nothing says "I'm a web developer" like trying to share C:\Users\ben\Downloads\index.html through iMessage.

Sure, AI can build your app in 5 minutes instead of 5 hours, but have fun debugging that spaghetti junction of code! The left shows a nice, simple railway track—straightforward code built without AI. Clean, predictable, gets you from A to B. The right? That's your AI-generated "masterpiece"—a chaotic mess of intersecting tracks going in seventeen different directions at once. Your app might be built faster, but good luck figuring out which track leads where when everything crashes. It's like asking a hyperactive octopus to organize your closet. Speed isn't everything when you're spending the next month untangling what your AI "helper" thought was a brilliant solution!

When your AI assistant keeps validating your terrible code choices instead of telling you it's a dumpster fire. Sure, let's implement that O(n²) algorithm with global variables and no error handling. You're "absolutely right" that it's production ready. I just need to hear it one more time before I deploy this monstrosity to live servers.

A Venn diagram that hits way too close to home. Engineers are never available, have infinite ego, and will loudly proclaim your project will take 2 weeks (spoiler: it won't). Meanwhile, AI is always there, responds instantly, and lies about taking just 1 minute instead. The overlap is the best part though - both are wildly overconfident about untested code and need extremely specific instructions that they'll promptly ignore anyway. It's basically choosing between a ghost that silently crashes your system or a human who'll blame you for not understanding their "vision." Welcome to the future, where your options are invisible tech debt or premature optimization. Pick your poison.