You Evaluate, AI Creates

Conference attendee sitting at their desk surrounded by enough AI swag to start a small museum, staring at their screen with the weight of a thousand unfinished side projects. Behind them, the Product Manager and Engineering Director loom like disappointed parents. The walls are plastered with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Hugging Face posters—basically a shrine to procrastination disguised as "staying current." The brutal truth: they don't want to actually build anything. They just need to check out the new LLMs. Because nothing says "productive engineer" like spending your entire week testing which AI model gives you the most creative excuse for not shipping features. The hype cycle chart in the background isn't just decoration—it's a lifestyle. That "Prompt Engineer" mug really ties the whole thing together. Chef's kiss.

There's a massive difference between being skeptical of AI because you understand its limitations, ethical concerns, and the hype cycle versus blindly hating it because some crypto-bro-turned-AI-guru is trying to sell you a $5000 course on "prompt engineering mastery." One is a principled technical stance, the other is just being tired of LinkedIn influencers calling themselves "AI thought leaders" after running ChatGPT twice. The tech industry has a real problem with snake oil salesmen who pivot from NFTs to AI faster than you can say "pivot to video." They oversell capabilities, underdeliver on promises, and make the rest of us who actually work with these technologies look bad. You can appreciate machine learning as a powerful tool while simultaneously wanting to throw your laptop when someone pitches "AI-powered blockchain synergy" in a meeting. It's like being a chef who loves cooking but hates people who sell $200 "artisanal" toast. The technology isn't the problem—it's the grifters monetizing the hype.

Ah, the dream job has finally arrived. Not only do you get to work for free as a "Prompt Engineer," but you also pay $500 weekly for the privilege of... doing unpaid work. It's basically an expensive subscription to pretend you have a job. Next up: paying for air to breathe in the office. The recruiter probably thinks they're being generous by not charging for bathroom breaks.

Remember when we argued about text editors like they were sports teams? Now we're just watching AI companies slap version numbers on VS Code forks like they're NFTs. "My VS Code fork has more digits than yours" is the new "my dad can beat up your dad." Meanwhile, Emacs users are still configuring their first keystroke from 1976.

Plot twist: the real Claude has been stuck in a pickleball tournament for months, desperately trying to tell people he's not an AI assistant. Meanwhile, developers keep asking him to debug their React components between serves. The guy just wanted to play some recreational sports, but now he's being asked to write cold emails to Fortune 500 CEOs with "no mistakes" - the pressure is unreal. Someone please rescue this man from the courts before he actually becomes sentient from all the coding requests.

Ah yes, the Head of Claude Code himself claiming "coding is largely solved" while Microsoft drops yet another KB update that nukes internet access for half their ecosystem. Nothing screams "solved" quite like a Windows update breaking Teams, Edge, OneDrive, AND Copilot in one fell swoop. The irony here is chef's kiss. AI bros out here declaring victory over programming while actual production systems are still playing whack-a-mole with critical bugs. Sure, AI can write code now, but can it predict which random Windows update will brick your entire workflow next Tuesday? Spoiler: it cannot. Fun fact: Microsoft has been releasing patches that break things since the dawn of time. It's basically a feature at this point. But hey, coding is "solved" so I'm sure the AI will fix it any minute now... right after it finishes hallucinating some more Stack Overflow answers.