These People Are Not Real

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 startup landscape has undergone a seismic shift! Back in the day, founders needed actual coding skills or capital to build their "million dollar app idea." Fast forward to 2023, and it's raining AI tools while programmers sleep through it all. Figma + ChatGPT + Midjourney are literally taking grenades to the traditional development process. The beautiful chaos of prompt engineering and no-code tools means anyone with a pulse can cobble together a functional prototype without writing a single semicolon. Clean architecture? Proper testing? Who needs that when you can just keep regenerating until something works!

Ah yes, the coveted "No AI" badge—proudly displayed by developers who spent 17 hours debugging their own spaghetti code instead of asking ChatGPT to fix it in 3 seconds. It's like bragging about churning your own butter when there's a perfectly good supermarket next door. "Look at me, I suffered unnecessarily and have the dark circles under my eyes to prove it!" Meanwhile, the deadline was yesterday and the client is wondering why a simple feature costs more than their car payment.

The modern developer's digital mirror match! GitHub Copilot is shaking hands with itself in the ultimate AI narcissism loop. When your code assistant both writes and reviews your code, it's basically just patting itself on the back. "Great job me, I approve of what I wrote!" This is peak programming efficiency—why waste time having humans review code when the robot can just high-five itself? The circle of AI life is complete. Next up: GitHub Copilot creating pull requests for problems it invented while reviewing its own code.

OH SWEET MOTHER OF LEGACY CODE! On one side, IBM is using AI to translate ancient COBOL spells into modern Java incantations. On the other, some government agency named DOGE (not the meme, sadly) wants to rewrite MILLIONS of lines of Social Security code in MONTHS?! 😱 This is like watching two different approaches to defusing a nuclear bomb - one careful robot surgeon vs. a toddler with safety scissors and a "can-do" attitude. The entire financial future of American retirees hanging in the balance because someone thought "Hey, let's just YOLO this 60-year-old codebase real quick!" I'm having heart palpitations just thinking about it! For the uninitiated: COBOL is that programming language your grandpa used that refuses to die because it runs basically EVERYTHING important - banks, airlines, and yes, your social security checks. It's the digital equivalent of those load-bearing walls you definitely shouldn't knock down during your weekend renovation project.

The classic tech industry delusion: celebrating a "successful" AI loan approval system while the privacy analyst stands there like the only adult at a toddler's birthday party. The team is blissfully high-fiving over their black-box algorithm that somehow decides who gets loans, completely ignoring that financial regulators would sooner approve a bank robbery than an unexplainable AI model. Nothing says "we're doomed" quite like a room full of engineers celebrating code that works but can't explain why it works. Regulators tend to be funny that way—they actually want to know how you decided to reject someone's mortgage application beyond "the machine said no."