Time Traveling AI Engineer

The eternal struggle of a desperate coder, captured in one image! On the left, we have LLMs promising to "help with programming questions" but won't actually insult you (how considerate). On the right, StackOverflow boasting it's "accurate" and "used by people who know what they're doing" while flexing knowledge of "even the most obscure languages." It's the perfect illustration of our coding dilemma: get polite, possibly hallucinated answers from an AI that treats you like a fragile child, or brave StackOverflow where your "simple question" will be closed as duplicate, marked as trivial, and someone will suggest you shouldn't be programming at all. Choose your poison!

That moment when your client says "just sprinkle some AI into our app" like they're asking for extra cheese on a pizza. Meanwhile, you're mentally calculating how many weekends you'll sacrifice to implement a neural network that can barely tell a cat from a toaster. Your fist clenches as they add "shouldn't take more than a day or two, right?" Sure, and I'll also build a quantum computer with paperclips and bubble gum while I'm at it.

Ah, Maslow's hierarchy of needs has been updated for the modern developer! Forget food and shelter—we've all collectively decided that affordable GPUs are the foundation of human existence. When your RTX 4090 costs more than your monthly rent, self-actualization becomes irrelevant. How can anyone achieve psychological stability when they're selling kidneys on the black market just to run machine learning models or play Cyberpunk at max settings? The crypto miners and AI boom have spoken—true enlightenment begins with affordable silicon. Everything else is just a luxury.

The modern "full stack" - three AI tabs open in your browser while you pretend to know what you're doing. Remember when being full stack meant actually knowing multiple languages and frameworks? Now it's just knowing which AI to ask for which problem. "Yes, I'm proficient in Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity" should be the new line on resumes. The only stack that matters is the stack of browser tabs helping you fake your way through that ticket your PM swore was "just a small change."

The modern developer's ark is a bizarre menagerie of code Frankenstein'd together from various sources. Up top, we've got the majestic AI tools (Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT) and the trusty GitHub repos we "borrow" from, plus those YouTube tutorials we frantically search at 2PM when nothing works. But when the client shows up? Suddenly we're presenting some unholy chimera of code that barely functions but somehow ships. The client's reaction is universal: "What the hell is this?" while we stand there pretending this abomination was our plan all along. The greatest skill in modern development isn't writing code—it's explaining why your code looks like it was written by five different people with conflicting goals... because it was.

That exhausted look when your coworker won't shut up about AI. The quotation marks around "programmers" say it all - real devs are busy fixing merge conflicts while the ChatGPT enthusiasts are planning how AI will write their next project. Meanwhile, the rest of us just want to finish our coffee before it gets cold.