What It Feels Like By Now

Ah, the sweet innocence of AI coding assistants. You ask them to fix one simple bug, and they happily fly away while your codebase explodes in the background. Twenty years in this industry and I've learned one truth: the only thing more dangerous than a junior dev with admin access is an AI confidently "helping" your code. The smug little face says it all - "My work here is done!" Meanwhile, you're left explaining to the product manager why the login button now launches nuclear missiles. Classic case of the cure being worse than the disease.

Grammar correction in the wild. King declares himself "the dumbest man alive," only to be immediately dethroned when someone mentions "AI prompt engineering is the future." The true champion of ignorance has been found. Happens to the best of us—one minute you're the dumbest person in the room, then someone walks in talking about their revolutionary prompt that just says "make it good" with fifteen exclamation points.

Oh, the eternal job security of dealing with clients who say they want a "simple website" but actually mean "Facebook but better" with a budget of $200. The AI apocalypse might be coming for some jobs, but programmers can sleep soundly knowing that no robot will ever decipher "make it pop" or "I'll know what I want when I see it." Our superpower isn't coding—it's somehow building functional software from requirements that change faster than JavaScript frameworks.

Oh my gosh, the infinite loop of code theft! 😂 First StackOverflow gives ChatGPT all its knowledge, then ChatGPT claims it made it. Then a programmer steals from ChatGPT and proudly declares "I made this!" Only for the code to eventually make its way back to StackOverflow! It's the perfect representation of the modern dev cycle: copy from StackOverflow → paste into ChatGPT → ask for improvements → copy to your project → claim full credit in your performance review! The circle of code life!

The eternal struggle of math majors who chose programming instead of the "traditional" math paths. On the left, we see the bright, colorful world of physics, machine learning, electrical engineering, statistics, and numerical analysis – all respectable career choices that utilize advanced mathematics. On the right, the noir film-style programmer, stripped of color and joy, questioning their life choices while debugging someone else's spaghetti code at 3 AM. That moment when you realize you could be solving differential equations but instead you're arguing with the compiler about why a semicolon is missing. The math degree prepared you to understand complex algorithms but forgot to mention you'd spend 90% of your time fixing indentation errors.

The evolution of software engineering in its natural habitat! First, we have the innocent "Software Engineer" - just a regular Pooh bear doing honest work. Then there's the slightly pretentious "Sr Software Engineer" - same bear, just wearing a tux and acting fancy because they learned what a design pattern is. But the final form? The "pRoMpt eNgiNeEr" with that cursed ransom-note typography - it's just a deranged panda typing "make me a website that looks like Amazon but better" into ChatGPT and calling it coding. The tech industry's equivalent of ordering a pizza and claiming you made dinner.