There Will Be Signs

Ah, the modern programmer's greatest alibi. "My model's thinking" has replaced "code's compiling" as the perfect excuse to stare blankly at nothing while your manager hovers nearby. The beauty is in the plausible deniability. Your LLM could be solving world hunger or generating cat pictures—nobody knows! And that 20-minute "thinking" phase? Could be processing terabytes of data or just stuck in an infinite loop. Either way, you're off the hook. Ten years in the industry and I've seen the excuses evolve from "the build's running" to "Docker's updating" to this masterpiece. Progress!

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.

So we were promised AI would automate all the boring stuff and free us up to do actual work. Instead, we got more meetings—just now they're about AI. Strategy sessions, adoption roadmaps, governance committees, ethical frameworks... it's meetings all the way down. The cruel irony is that AI was supposed to be our savior from calendar hell, but management heard "AI" and immediately scheduled 6 recurring syncs to discuss it. You're not coding anymore—you're explaining to stakeholders why ChatGPT can't just "fix the legacy codebase" while your actual sprint work collects dust. The revolution will not be automated. It will be scheduled for 2pm on Thursday with optional attendance.

Remember the ancient times of 2022 when we actually had to think for ourselves? The shocking revelation that someone can write code without ChatGPT finishing their sentences is now apparently an exotic skill worth gossiping about. Next they'll be amazed by developers who can fix bugs without StackOverflow or remember their own passwords. What a strange world we live in where not outsourcing your brain to an AI is considered a superpower.

Content digital VAX 11/780 The Ticketmaster system is a hodge-podge of C and assembler and runs on ancient VMS hardware. The people who developed and maintained it are long since dead and/or retired. It has proven impossible to replace because nothing has been found that can handle thousands of simultaneous purchases as efficiently. The server room that houses the VMS machines has a room where a goat is left every two weeks. The next day, the goat is gone.

The tech industry's selective standards are painfully real. They'll reject a fresh grad for not implementing some theoretical O(n) algorithm they'll never use again, but will happily throw billions at AI models running on brute-force compute that would make any algorithm professor have an existential crisis. For those who don't know, O(n) refers to linear time complexity - basically how efficiently an algorithm scales. Companies obsess over this in interviews then proceed to ignore efficiency completely when it comes to their shiny new toys. Next time you're rejected for not optimizing a binary tree traversal fast enough, just remember - somewhere a data center is melting the polar ice caps to generate a cat picture.