The 15,000 Traitors

Content interview preparation vs actual work O'REILLY Designing Data-Intensive Applications THE BIG IDEAS BEHIND RELIABLE, SCALABLE, AND MAINTAINABLE SYSTEMS Martin Kleppmann

The eternal battle between sales and engineering continues! Sales execs looking at new projects like they're discovering the One Ring to rule them all – "Let's sprinkle some blockchain and AI on it!" Meanwhile, developers are channeling their inner Aragorn with a firm "NO" that contains the exhaustion of a thousand pointless standups. It's the corporate version of "We have blockchain at home. The blockchain at home: an Excel spreadsheet with a password." The irony? Most projects that "need" blockchain and AI could be solved with a decent database and some if/else statements.

JetBrains turning down the boring responsible work of fixing bugs and adding features in favor of shoving AI into everything is peak 2023 software development. The industry's collective hallucination that AI will magically solve problems we can't even articulate properly is hilarious. Meanwhile, users just want their damn IDE to stop crashing during compile time. But hey, now it can auto-complete with the confidence of a junior dev who skimmed Stack Overflow for 5 minutes!

The desperate plea of a prompt engineer trying to wrangle an AI into submission. The modern equivalent of bargaining with a compiler, except this time the error messages are just passive-aggressive hallucinations. That desperate "bro" energy hits different when your entire job depends on whether an AI decides to follow JSON syntax today. Somewhere, a CS professor is weeping while a product manager is asking "but can't we just tell it to stop making mistakes?"

The eternal struggle between developer and AI. One wants a magical performance boost with zero effort, while the other suggests doing actual optimization work. Reminds me of every junior dev who thinks adding more RAM will fix their O(n²) algorithm. Spoiler: it won't. Batman's slap represents the harsh reality check we all need sometimes—no AI will save you from learning proper engineering practices.

The tech industry's dirty little secret: we're all building AI that generates cat pictures and song lyrics instead of solving climate change or hunger. Why? Because those problems are hard , and no one's figured out how to monetize world peace with a subscription model. Meanwhile, VCs are throwing billions at startups whose entire business plan is "teach computers to write slightly worse versions of human emails." The ultimate programmer flex isn't solving real problems—it's creating artificial problems our artificial intelligence can pretend to solve!