The Elephant AI Never Saw

Behold the great decline of our noble profession. We went from muscle-bound legends who wrote code without AI crutches and built entire games in Assembly (because apparently pain is character-building) to modern keyboard jockeys who can't center a div without consulting Google for the 47th time today. The golden age programmer fixed memory leaks by hand, while we're over here begging ChatGPT to fix our syntax errors like it's our personal code therapist. And let's not forget the programmer trapped in Vim since 2018 because :q! is apparently harder to remember than differential calculus. The final insult? We fix one bug and create three more. It's not a development cycle, it's a pyramid scheme.

Tech companies promising "democratized AI for everyone" until you ask about pricing is the tech industry's oldest bait and switch. Sure, they're "being honest" about making AI available—just conveniently forgetting to mention it'll cost you the equivalent of a car payment. And that awkward moment when the customer actually thanks them for the privilege of being financially drained? Pure Stockholm syndrome that every product manager dreams of.

The true superpower of developers isn't writing code—it's surviving vendor hell. While everyone's panicking about AI taking our jobs, they're forgetting the eternal constant of tech: third-party vendors with documentation that's either fantasy fiction or written by someone who never used their own product. Those five desperate emails you sent last week? Still unread. That support ticket from last month? "Under investigation." Meanwhile your PM is wondering why that "simple integration" is taking so long. Good luck replacing us with AI when even humans can't figure out what the hell your API is supposed to do.

The corporate AI fever in a single frame! That dad just burned through millions on generative AI "proof-of-concepts" that will forever remain in the graveyard of tech demos. The son's sarcastic "What a legend" is peak engineering cynicism—he already knows these projects are the software equivalent of buying a treadmill that becomes a clothes hanger. Meanwhile, every ML engineer is nodding furiously because they've watched executives throw cash at half-baked AI ideas with the ROI strategy of "figure it out later." The real production environment was the friends we made along the way!

Ah, "Vibe Coding" – where the only requirement is vibes and absolutely zero coding knowledge. Started as industry satire, now it's an actual 4-week course with a fancy instructor in a green suit promising to make you feel good about not understanding a single line of code. This is like offering "Vibe Surgery" where you just hold a scalpel and manifest healing energy. Next up: "Vibe Engineering" – build bridges with positive affirmations and Instagram filters. The tech industry has officially completed its transformation from "we need skilled engineers" to "just bring your authentic self and we'll figure out how to deploy that to production."

The AI assistant lifecycle in six painful acts. First, AI screams it has the "BEST SOLUTION TO YOUR PROBLEM!" Then you explain "IT IS NOT WORKING." The AI pivots: "OKAY, TRY THIS APPROACH INSTEAD!" But it's "NOT EVEN CLOSE TO WHAT I NEED." The AI proudly declares it "WORKS ON MY DATASET!" before you finally storm off muttering "WILL DO IT MYSELF." It's the modern version of "works on my machine" except now we're gaslighted by a model trained on StackOverflow instead of a coworker who refuses to admit their code is broken. The circle of tech life continues...