The Chaotic Path From A To B

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.

The AI industry in a nutshell: app developers are out here looking like they just stepped off a yacht in Monaco, sipping oat milk lattes and closing Series B funding rounds. Meanwhile, the ML engineers training those models? They're living that grad student lifestyle—empty wine bottles, cigarette ash, and a profound sense of existential dread while babysitting a GPU cluster for 72 hours straight because the loss curve won't converge. The app devs just call an API endpoint and suddenly they're "AI innovators." The model trainers are debugging why their transformer architecture is hallucinating Shakespeare quotes in a sentiment analysis task at 4 AM. One group gets VC money and TechCrunch articles. The other gets a stack overflow error and clinical depression. The duality of AI development is truly something to behold.

Turns out copying and pasting the same AI-generated cover letter 2,000 times doesn't trick the hiring algorithm after all! Who would've thought that recruiters might catch on to the generic "I'm passionate about leveraging synergies" template that reads like it was written by a bot having a stroke? The job market's already brutal enough without shooting yourself in the foot with ChatGPT's mediocre writing skills. The best part? These grads probably spent more time figuring out how to automate their applications than it would've taken to write 10 genuine ones that might've actually worked.

The classic tech hype cycle in its natural habitat. First, AI writes 90% of code. Then AI writes 100% of code. Then reality hits and humans get paid premium wages to fix the AI's spaghetti code. Reminds me of that time we deployed an "automated" monitoring system that generated so many false alerts we had to hire three people just to monitor the monitoring system. Progress!

The time traveler has been spotted! ChatGPT launched in 2022, but apparently Courage was the beta tester back in '96. That old computer wasn't running Python or JavaScript—it was running pure anxiety. The irony of a "cowardly" dog secretly being the first AI prompt engineer is just *chef's kiss*. Developers today think they're revolutionary for asking an AI to write their regex, meanwhile Courage was probably using it to generate excuses for Eustace about why the farm's network was down again.

When AI tools and low-code platforms started promising that anyone could build software in minutes, the tech industry collectively nodded and said "sure, Jan." But someone finally said the quiet part out loud: if coding suddenly became 10x easier without any actual innovation in computer science, maybe—just maybe—the whole thing is smoke and mirrors. It's like watching someone claim they invented a revolutionary diet pill that lets you eat whatever you want, except the pill is just a rebranded multivitamin and aggressive marketing. The real kicker? The industry's been hyping these "revolutionary" tools while senior devs are still debugging the same CSS alignment issues they were fighting in 2015.