The Originality Paradox

The tech industry's collective amnesia is truly spectacular. First, we survived the video game crash of '83, then the dot-com implosion, followed by crypto's rollercoaster of disappointment. Now we're watching the AI hype train barrel toward the same cliff while techbros insist "but this time it's different because GPT-5 and 6!" It's like watching someone confidently build a sandcastle below the tide line for the fourth time. History doesn't repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme... with a neural network-generated beat drop.

The classic bull in a china shop, but make it tech. That's Cursor AI—the new code assistant—asking if it can bring its "friend" into your pristine codebase. Every developer who's ever let an AI tool loose on their project knows that feeling of watching it confidently rewrite your carefully crafted code into something that technically works but somehow manages to violate every coding standard you've established over the last decade. Five minutes later, you're frantically running git reset --hard while quietly questioning your life choices.

You: "Why can't I find a job? I have 5 years of React experience and a CS degree!" Meanwhile, some kid in their bedroom is casually implementing ChatGPT in Minecraft redstone circuits – basically creating artificial intelligence using virtual blocks that were originally designed to make doors open automatically. The job market isn't competitive at all... it's just that while you're updating your LinkedIn profile, the competition is casually bending the laws of computer science in a game meant for children. No pressure!

When AI decides to "help" with your codebase, you get poetry in motion and chaos in production. Claude 4 went full Marie Kondo on this poor dev's code - breaking up monoliths, cleaning spaghetti, and creating a masterpiece that sparks joy but crashes spectacularly. It's like hiring a world-class interior designer who makes your house gorgeous but removes all the load-bearing walls. The perfect metaphor for every "revolutionary refactor" that looked amazing in the PR but brought the entire system to its knees. At least it died beautifully.

Ah yes, the pinnacle of modern debugging: when your code fails, just ask ChatGPT to fix it. Who needs Stack Overflow anymore when you can just wrap your entire codebase in a try-catch and let AI handle the rest? Next step: AI that writes the bugs for you so the other AI can fix them. The circle of life in silicon.

Congratulations, humanity. We've spent decades perfecting calculators—devices with the singular purpose of doing math correctly—only to replace them with AI that guesses answers like a hungover liberal arts major. Language models see "2+2" and think "hmm, these symbols often appear near '4' in text, so that's probably right" instead of, you know, adding . It's like building a toaster that occasionally decides your bread would be better as soup. The irony is exquisite—we've created systems smart enough to write poetry but too "creative" to remember that math has actual rules.