O'Reilly: Coding With GPT

The irony is thicker than legacy code documentation. OpenAI, with its cute little whale logo, has become increasingly closed-source while still parading around with "Open" in its name. It's like naming your password database "Totally_Not_Passwords.txt" and expecting nobody to notice. The "ClosedAI" rebrand is just calling a spade a spade – or in this case, calling proprietary code exactly what it is. Next up: Microsoft renames to "We_Definitely_Need_More_RAM_Inc."

The public thinks AI is some mystical brain-to-brain knowledge transfer. Amateur programmers imagine it's a beautiful network of interconnected nodes making intelligent decisions. Meanwhile, actual developers know it's just a mountain of nested if-statements descending into madness. That bottom panel hits different after you've spent 15 years in the industry. Fancy marketing terms like "neural networks" and "deep learning" sound impressive until you peek behind the curtain and find what's essentially glorified pattern matching with extra steps. The "10,000 if-statements" comment is the chef's kiss of cynical developer truth. We're not creating consciousness—we're just building increasingly complex decision trees and hoping nobody notices.

Tech companies promising "democratized AI for everyone" until you ask about pricing is the tech industry's oldest bait and switch. Sure, they're "being honest" about making AI available—just conveniently forgetting to mention it'll cost you the equivalent of a car payment. And that awkward moment when the customer actually thanks them for the privilege of being financially drained? Pure Stockholm syndrome that every product manager dreams of.

The eternal developer paradox: starts with "just a quick fix" at 4 AM, ends with a catastrophic codebase massacre. Those bloodshot eyes tell the whole story—the ChatGPT-fueled coding frenzy that began with noble intentions but spiraled into digital chaos. The cat watching through the window is basically your sanity waving goodbye while you descend into madness one prompt at a time. The real horror isn't the bugs—it's the realization you'll have to explain this to your team tomorrow.

ChatGPT spent 69 minutes and 42 seconds "thinking" just to tell you "You can't." That's like watching your senior architect stare at the whiteboard for over an hour during a planning meeting, only for them to turn around and say "nope, not possible" without any further explanation. The irony here is beautiful. Someone's trying to install CUDA 12.1 on Ubuntu 24.04, and the AI that supposedly saves you weeks of work just burned over an hour to deliver the most unhelpful two-word response possible. No workarounds, no alternatives, no "but here's what you CAN do" — just pure, unfiltered rejection. You could've googled this, read three Stack Overflow threads, tried two wrong solutions, and still had time left over to make coffee. But sure, let's call it "incredible" and a "solid product." The future of development is waiting 69 minutes for a chatbot to say no.

The hard pill that data scientists refuse to swallow! While everyone's obsessed with fancy neural networks and complex algorithms, the brutal reality is that garbage data produces garbage results, no matter how sophisticated your model is. It's like putting lipstick on a pig - your 17-layer deep learning architecture won't save you from the mess of unclean, biased data you're feeding it. The real heroes aren't the ones with the fanciest models but the poor souls who spend weeks cleaning datasets nobody will ever appreciate. Next time someone brags about their model's accuracy, ask them about their data preprocessing steps and watch them squirm!