The Four Bins Of Modern Development

Nothing quite like spending 60 hours a week coding your own obsolescence. The snake eating its tail is the perfect metaphor for us building AI tools that will eventually replace us. "Just one more automation script and I'll have more time to work on important things" – said right before automating yourself out of a job. It's like sawing off the branch you're sitting on, but with better version control.

Remember when programmers were basically coding demigods who could bend computers to their will? Now we're just sad creatures Googling "how to center div" for the 500th time and begging AI to fix our mistakes. The golden age programmer wrote code without StackOverflow, crafted entire games in Assembly (you know, that language that makes you want to cry), manually fixed memory leaks with pointers, and literally hand-coded the software that put humans on the freaking moon. Meanwhile, modern programmers are trapped in Vim wondering why :q doesn't work, fixing one bug only to create three more like some kind of hydra nightmare, and asking ChatGPT to solve problems we should probably understand ourselves. The decline is real, folks. But hey, at least we have dark mode now.

That's not a white dot, that's Cursor AI sharing your plaintext password file with every hacker on the planet. Nothing says "security professional" like storing credentials in a CSV file named "passwords.csv" and then asking about UI elements while exposing it. Somewhere, a security engineer just felt a disturbance in the force and doesn't know why.

When your resume is just a list of tech companies that imploded right after you left. Nothing suspicious here, folks. Just a trail of digital catastrophes following this person like a shadow. Netflix sports streaming that doesn't exist yet, CrowdStrike's Windows update disaster, Google's Gemini historical figure fiasco, Silicon Valley Bank collapse, and FTX's crypto meltdown. Hiring managers will definitely not notice this pattern of working at companies right before they face existential crises. Solid career strategy - join, collect paycheck, abandon ship, repeat.

Corporate tech in a nutshell. Some executive burns through millions on AI "innovations" that are basically expensive tech demos destined for the graveyard. Meanwhile, the kid who'll inherit this mess someday is already recognizing the corporate cycle of wasted resources. The real kicker? Those hundreds of proof-of-concepts probably could've been one solid product if someone had just said "no" to the next shiny AI buzzword. But that wouldn't look good on the quarterly innovation report, would it?

Remember when we thought we'd train AI to help us write code? Top panel: cute little AI cub learning from the wise software engineer master. Bottom panel: six months later, that same AI has evolved into a towering beast while we're still sitting there with our legacy code knowledge from 2019. The career progression timeline has been dramatically compressed. Took me 15 years to become a tech lead. Took AI about 15 minutes to make half my StackOverflow contributions irrelevant. But hey, at least I still know how to exit Vim. For now.