On The Same Boat

The inevitable hipster-ification of web development has arrived. Just like artisanal coffee shops charging $9 for "hand-poured" water, we'll soon have developers selling "organic, handwritten, non-AI websites" at premium prices. Next they'll be telling us their HTML is free-range and their CSS was harvested during a full moon. Can't wait for the "small-batch, locally-sourced JavaScript" trend to hit.

Remember when we spent hours implementing binary trees and sorting algorithms from scratch? Now there's a line of developers sprinting toward ChatGPT while the "Data Structures & Algorithms" door collects dust. Why bother with Big O notation when you can just prompt engineer your way to a solution? The irony is we still need those fundamentals to understand if ChatGPT's code will crash and burn in production. But hey, who has time for that when deadlines are yesterday?

The eternal dance between developers and regex—a cryptic language that might as well be ancient runes. When ChatGPT spits out a working regex that looks like someone headbutted a keyboard, what do we do? Copy-paste that mystical incantation and back away slowly. It's the modern equivalent of summoning a demon—you don't need to understand the Latin, you just need the spell to work. And when it does? Pure dopamine. That smug satisfaction of solving a problem without actually understanding the solution is programming at its finest. Future you will hate present you when that regex breaks in six months. But that's a problem for future you, who is, quite frankly, a bit of a buzzkill anyway.

Ah, the Venn diagram of modern development. On the left: burnout, technical debt, pointless meetings, and constant reprioritizing. On the right: AI coding assistants speeding things up by Googling boilerplate code. And in that magical intersection? "Generating subtle, devastating bugs." That's efficiency for you—now we can create catastrophic failures twice as fast. Progress!

Just sitting back with my popcorn watching the AI hype train derail in slow motion. All these devs who pivoted their entire careers to "prompt engineering" are about to discover what us old-timers already know - there's no shortcut to understanding the fundamentals. When the hallucinations pile up and the VC money dries out, guess who'll be debugging the mess? The same people who've been writing actual code for decades. Munching carrots while watching careers burn is my new hobby.

The cosmic weight scale has a new champion! While astronomers worry about black holes and neutron stars, developers know the true gravitational monsters: Python virtual environments, Node modules, and PyTorch/CUDA installations. Nothing collapses spacetime quite like waiting for npm install to finish or watching your disk space vanish as PyTorch downloads half the internet. At least black holes have the decency to be millions of light years away—your Python venv is right there, crushing your hard drive and your spirits simultaneously.