Thanks Andrew For The Reality Check

Remember when we actually had to understand algorithms? Now it's just "fancy bear, what's the optimal way to balance this binary tree?" And Stack Overflow? That's just AI with extra steps and judgment. But coding without internet? That's like trying to remember your ex's phone number – theoretically possible but why would you put yourself through that pain? The real pros among us still have that O'Reilly book collection gathering dust somewhere, just in case the apocalypse hits and we need to remember how pointers work.

Modern programming is just AI shopping. Why solve a problem yourself when you can make five different AIs race to solve it for you? The real skill isn't writing code anymore—it's knowing which AI's hallucinations are least likely to crash in production. The "hit run on all five" part is where the true chaos begins. Nothing says "I trust my code" like throwing five different AI solutions at the wall and seeing which one sticks. Bonus points if you don't actually understand any of them but confidently present the winner in your next code review. The "like a psychopath" is just chef's kiss perfect. Because what's more psychotic than spending 3 hours asking AIs the same question when you could have just written the damn function yourself in 20 minutes?

The initial joy of getting 10,000 lines of AI-generated code in minutes quickly transforms into the crushing reality of what comes next. That smiling face knows what's coming - endless refactoring sessions, security vulnerability patches, and explaining to management why that "instant solution" needs two years of cleanup. It's the coding equivalent of ordering fast food and then dealing with indigestion for days. The technical debt interest rate is brutal, and Hide-the-Pain Harold knows it!

The honeymoon phase with AI coding assistants is officially over! Senior developers are throwing their hands up after a few weeks of dealing with hallucinated functions, confidently incorrect syntax, and those magical solutions that somehow break everything else in your codebase. It's like watching your junior dev confidently refactor your entire auth system without understanding what OAuth actually does. Back to Stack Overflow and cryptic documentation we go - at least those don't pretend to understand your project architecture!

Ah, the modern developer's version of "my code is compiling." Remember when we had to wait for actual compile times? Now we just blame the AI for our extended coffee breaks. The beauty is that nobody can verify if ChatGPT is actually still working or if you've been scrolling Reddit for the last 45 minutes. And the best part? Management can't argue because they're doing the exact same thing. It's the perfect crime - you're technically "waiting for a tool" while secretly planning your weekend. And if anyone questions the time it takes, just mutter something about "token limits" and "complex prompting strategies."

The sheer audacity of asking ChatGPT to invert a binary tree in C++ while actual developers spent hours debugging pointer nightmares and memory leaks to master this! Tree inversion—flipping all nodes left to right—is that classic algorithm question that separates CS degree holders from Stack Overflow copypasters. Meanwhile, ChatGPT just spits out a perfect implementation without experiencing the character-building trauma of segmentation faults and midnight debugging sessions. The sacrifices we made learning manual memory management weren't just for someone to get the answer in 2 seconds from an AI!