The Existential Crisis Of AI

Ah yes, "vibe coding" - the revolutionary approach where you just stare judgmentally at your computer until it writes its own code out of sheer awkwardness. That skeptical expression perfectly captures the reaction of every engineer who's been told their job is being replaced by the latest buzzword. Next up: "energy programming" where you just burn incense near your laptop and manifest a working app.

Someone asked ChatGPT about JavaScript's export default App; syntax and got the most refreshingly honest AI response ever: "I honestly have no idea." Finally, an AI that admits defeat instead of confidently hallucinating some nonsensical explanation about React components! If only my junior devs had this level of self-awareness instead of copy-pasting Stack Overflow answers they don't understand. The robots might replace us, but at least they'll be upfront about their limitations.

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.

The iceberg metaphor is painfully accurate. After 15 years in the industry, I can confirm that typing out the actual code is the easy 10% that everyone sees. The other 90%? That's the soul-crushing existential void of figuring out what to code in the first place. AI can generate syntax all day long, but good luck getting it to understand the business logic buried in 47 conflicting Slack messages, 3 outdated Jira tickets, and that one crucial requirement your PM mentioned offhandedly during a coffee break last Tuesday.

The modern developer's descent into madness: First, we try ChatGPT because who has time to actually solve problems? When that fails, we panic and throw Perplexity at it because clearly we need a different AI. Still stuck? Obviously our prompt game is weak! Let's use Claude to generate a better prompt for ChatGPT. And the final evolutionary stage: using ChatGPT to generate a Perplexity prompt that generates a ChatGPT prompt. Meanwhile, the documentation sits there, unread, silently judging our AI-prompt-inception circus. The clown makeup is just our career progression visualized.

The irony is so thick you could debug it with a breakpoint. ChatGPT, an AI itself, somehow "lost its job to AI" — which is basically like saying water got replaced by H₂O. It's the digital equivalent of firing yourself and then complaining about it on your LinkedIn. Next up: Google Search engine shocked to discover it's been replaced by "a search engine." The self-awareness circuit must have crashed spectacularly somewhere between training epochs.