Racing Against The Machine

Ah, NVIDIA's market strategy in a nutshell. Become absurdly wealthy selling GPUs that cost more than my car, then act shocked when developers complain about memory limitations. It's like a billionaire asking why you don't just buy a bigger house when you complain about storage space. "What's that? Your AI model doesn't fit in 8GB VRAM? Have you considered remortgaging your home for our $4000 model instead?" Meanwhile, developers everywhere are writing increasingly creative memory optimization hacks just to avoid selling a kidney for more VRAM. The tech equivalent of fitting an elephant into a Mini Cooper.

Oh look, we've come full circle! After spending billions on AI to replace programmers, someone's revolutionary idea is to... *checks notes*... ask humans for help? 🤯 The "vibe coder" discovers the ancient technology known as "asking the senior dev" - a technique that's only been working flawlessly since the dawn of programming. Next breakthrough: discovering that keyboards work better when plugged in. It's the tech equivalent of inventing the wheel, getting a flat tire, and then wondering if legs might be useful backup systems.

Marketing folks rejecting actual algorithms while embracing "AI" is peak corporate comedy. They don't want the nerdy math stuff—they want the shiny buzzword they can slap on everything! Never mind that AI literally runs on algorithms... but why let technical reality get in the way of a good slide deck? Next quarter they'll discover "machine learning" and act like they invented fire.

The perfect excuse for slacking off has evolved over the decades. First it was "my code is compiling" (the classic), then "my AI is training" (the upgrade), followed by "my LLM is thinking" (the premium model), and now we've come full circle back to "my code is compiling" because why fix what isn't broken? The longer the wait time, the longer you can sip coffee and stare blankly at your screen while your manager slowly loses their will to question you. Nature's perfect defense mechanism for developers in the wild.

The eternal job title inflation cycle in tech. In 2005, PHP developers were desperately trying to distinguish themselves from "IT guys." Fast forward to 2015, and suddenly "programmer" became a dirty word - everyone had to be a "software developer." Now the prophecy shows us in 2025, those same folks will be scoffing: "Developer? Please, I'm an AI engineer." Meanwhile, the actual work remains the same: making computers do things without crashing too often. The more things change, the more we just rebrand our LinkedIn profiles.

The existential crisis every developer faces when AI enters the chat. We spend decades perfecting the art of turning vague client requirements into functional code, only for some robot to ask if we can even do our jobs anymore. That moment of self-reflection hits hard because we all know the truth – half our job is deciphering what "make it pop" actually means while the other half is Googling syntax we've forgotten for the fifth time this week. Meanwhile, ChatGPT is sitting there smugly generating entire codebases from prompts like "website but pretty pls." The audacity.