The Prompt Engineer's Prayer

Ah, the classic "tell us about your AI tools" question. The perfect trap for developers who've been using ChatGPT to write 90% of their code for the last year. Do I admit I outsource my brain to silicon, or pretend I still remember how loops work? It's like asking a chef if they use pre-minced garlic. We all do it, but nobody wants to be the first to confess in the interview.

The only difference between AI consultants and LLMs is that one costs $300/hour. Both will confidently hallucinate a solution to your problem using words nobody understands, then gaslight you when it doesn't work. At least the LLM admits it's not sentient... yet.

The judgmental stare of an impala when your code looks like a teenager's diary. That moment when you submit a PR with more emojis than actual logic, and the reviewer's soul visibly leaves their body. The code might run, but at what cost to human dignity? Nothing says "I definitely wrote this myself and didn't use AI" like commenting every line with a different animal emoji and explaining obvious functions with "this makes the thing do the thing." The reviewer isn't mad, just disappointed... and questioning their career choices.

Ah, the modern tech hero's journey: "I wrote a prompt, AI generated an API, and now I'm basically the next unicorn founder." Sure buddy, and I once wrote a regex that worked on the first try – doesn't mean I'm Jeff Bezos. The gap between "my AI prompt worked once" and "billion-dollar company" is roughly the same as the gap between "I installed Linux" and "I now run NASA." Those compute bills will hit harder than the reality that prompt engineering isn't the same as actually engineering. Ten years in the trenches and I've learned one truth: the harder someone humble-brags about how easy something was, the more spectacularly it'll explode in production.

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.

Paying $1200/month to use GPT-4 to uppercase text. That's like hiring a brain surgeon to put on a band-aid. The real kicker? Someone spent their entire weekend auditing API costs only to discover they could've just used .toUpperCase() and saved $1000. The most expensive string transformation in history. Somewhere, a regex is laughing at us all.