The Evolution Of Developer Crutches

The stark reality of today's coding world in one perfect meme. Senior dev finally had enough of watching the junior generate 200 lines of spaghetti code with GitHub Copilot just to print "Hello World". The painful truth is we're raising a generation of devs who can't fizzbuzz their way out of a paper bag without an AI whispering sweet solutions in their ear. And yet... aren't we all just one Stack Overflow outage away from revealing our true incompetence?

The traffic light is literally hanging by a thread but still functioning—just like that spaghetti code you wrote at 3 AM with 17 nested if-statements and zero comments. Sure, it violates every engineering principle known to mankind, but the unit tests pass! That red light stopping traffic is the digital equivalent of your monstrosity somehow preventing production crashes while your tech lead silently weeps during code review.

Ah, the eternal dev dream: "Can AI just handle all this data conversion crap so I don't have to?" Meanwhile, every developer who's spent weeks building custom parsers for legacy government PDFs is quietly sobbing in the corner. The real treasury isn't money—it's the sanity we lost converting Excel to JSON. Pro tip: if you want to feel true pain, try parsing a PDF that was originally a scanned document from 1997 that someone converted to Word and then back to PDF again.

Sometimes the dumbest solution is the winning solution! This freshman created a poker bot with just two lines of code: if isMyTurn: goAllIn() and absolutely demolished sophisticated algorithms by exploiting their risk-averse logic. The sophisticated bots kept folding to aggressive all-ins, proving that in both poker and programming, simplicity can trump complexity. It's basically the computational equivalent of the "spray and pray" technique—except it actually worked!

GitHub Copilot's autocomplete is so aggressive that searches for "how to turn off Copilot" have skyrocketed 266%. That's not a bug report—that's a cry for help. The tool meant to make you code faster has become the clingy coworker who finishes your sentences wrong. You type "function get" and suddenly you've got 47 lines of code you didn't ask for, solving a problem you don't have. The real kicker? People are so desperate to disable it that they're Googling the same question over and over, probably because Copilot keeps autocompleting their search query with something completely useless. It's the digital equivalent of trying to politely tell someone to stop helping you.

Terminal users rejecting the simple ls command in favor of the more verbose $~ Show me the contents of the folder is peak AI prompt era nonsense. Next thing you know they'll be typing "Please, kind terminal, would you be so gracious as to display all hidden files" instead of ls -la . The efficiency is just... gone.