The Dumbest Man Alive Gets Outplayed

Ah yes, the mythical "real programmer" – that elusive creature who apparently codes everything from scratch using nothing but pure brain power and cosmic vibes. Meanwhile, in reality, the rest of us mortals are over here frantically Googling syntax, copying from Stack Overflow, and begging AI to fix our broken code at 3 AM. The gatekeeping is strong with this one! Next thing you'll tell me "real programmers" only code on punchcards while standing barefoot in the snow, uphill both ways.

The AI hype train has left the station and everything's suddenly a "vibe" now. LLMs? Vibe. Image generators? Vibe. Neural networks? Big vibe energy. Meanwhile, developers are just nodding along in meetings, terrified to admit they have no idea why marketing keeps calling their REST API a "conversational vibe interface." Too late to ask now. Just smile and pretend you've been vibing all along.

Every decade brings a new "revolutionary" way to make developers obsolete, yet here we are, still debugging at 3 AM. Visual Programming in the '90s promised drag-and-drop salvation, MDA in the 2000s swore models would auto-generate everything, No-Code platforms in the 2010s claimed anyone could build apps without writing a line. Now we've got "Vibe-Code" where you just describe what you want and AI does the heavy lifting. Spoiler alert: someone still needs to fix it when the AI hallucinates a database schema or generates a sorting algorithm that runs in O(n!). The pattern is clear—each generation thinks they've cracked the code to eliminate coding itself. Meanwhile, programmers keep getting paid to clean up the mess these "solutions" create. Job security through eternal optimism, baby.

Nothing quite like the existential crisis of typing a complex ChatGPT prompt only to accidentally hit Enter too soon. You've now summoned an AI with the intellectual context of a goldfish. And of course, when you actually want a new line for readability in your carefully crafted novel-length prompt, suddenly Enter decides it's time to send. It's the keyboard equivalent of pushing when it says pull.

Ah, the classic marketing vs. reality divide. Developers know that what they built is just a simple counter algorithm that goes from 1 to 10, but marketing swoops in and suddenly it's "AI POWERED™" with a trademark symbol because god forbid we call things what they actually are. After 20 years in this industry, I've seen "revolutionary AI" that was just a bunch of if-statements wrapped in a fancy UI. The trademark symbol is the chef's kiss of bullshit – nothing says "we're pretending this is special" quite like a completely unnecessary ™.