Bar Chart Sorting Algorithm

That moment when a children's chair has better edge detection than your 3000-line image processing algorithm. Spent two weeks optimizing your code only to be outperformed by a piece of furniture from Blues Clues. The black outline is just mocking your gradient descent functions at this point.

That hollow feeling when you watch an AI model execute your former coding responsibilities with cold, algorithmic precision. There you sit, equal parts impressed and devastated, as your precious hand-crafted algorithms—once your pride and joy—are now just another task for the silicon overlord. The machine doesn't even have the decency to struggle with that tricky edge case that kept you up for three nights. Relationship status with your code: It's complicated.

Your brain at 2AM, hitting you with useless programming trivia that will haunt you forever: The string "()()" isn't a palindrome because reading it backward gives ")()(", but "()(" is a palindrome because it reads as ")(" backward - which is the same when you consider parentheses as characters. The kind of revelation that makes you question your life choices and wonder why you're still awake contemplating bracket symmetry instead of sleeping like a normal human.

First panel: AI reaching for a beautiful painting on the wall, representing our dreams of intelligent systems creating magnificent art. Second panel: Reality hits with a wall of if(){} statements. That's right folks, behind the curtain of every "AI" product your CEO is hyping up is just a glorified chain of conditional logic some poor dev had to write at 1 AM while questioning their career choices. Seven years of computer science education to write if(user_says_hello) return "Hello there!" but with better variable names.

Day 5 of Advent of Code and you've already abandoned all principles of clean code. That incomprehensible mess of symbols? That's what happens when you stop writing code for humans and start writing it for the leaderboard gods. The "Enchantment Table" reference is perfect—it literally looks like Minecraft's unreadable alien script. You started Day 1 with proper variable names and comments. By Day 5, you're using c+c+n@ as a variable and somehow it works. This is the programming equivalent of a descent into madness, documented in real-time. Your future self will hate you, but at least you saved 3 seconds of typing. Fun fact: This style of ultra-compact, symbol-heavy code is actually a badge of honor in code golf circles, where the goal is to solve problems in the fewest characters possible. But in production code? Straight to jail.

Standing in a field waiting for AI to replace developers who can't handle regex? Might be a while. Regular expressions aren't actually hard—they're just a precise language for pattern matching that follows logical rules. The real challenge is remembering to escape your backslashes twice and not writing patterns so complex that future-you sends death threats to past-you. Meanwhile, AI still struggles with "select all images with traffic lights," so maybe learn regex instead of waiting for the robot uprising.