It Is Happening Again

Code review energy is inversely proportional to the number of lines changed. It's like asking someone to proofread a sentence versus a novel—with 10 lines, you're hunting for typos with a magnifying glass. With 500 lines? "Looks good to me, ship it." Your brain just goes into self-preservation mode because nobody has the mental bandwidth to thoroughly review a small book's worth of code changes. Plus, let's be real: if you actually found issues in those 500 lines, you'd have to write an essay's worth of feedback, and ain't nobody got time for that. So we all collectively agree to nod and hope the CI/CD catches the bugs instead.

That moment when it hits you—your entire coding career has been reduced to "vibes" since ChatGPT arrived. No more grinding through Stack Overflow at 3 AM; now it's just "Hey AI, fix this mess" and hoping for the best. Your carefully cultivated programming skills? Just expensive intuition for prompting. Your CS degree? Just fancy paper to frame next to your "I used to write my own code" participation trophy.

Converting a Python script to an executable is the digital equivalent of asking a cat to fetch - theoretically possible, but prepare for chaos. PyInstaller promises a simple "one-command solution" but delivers a screaming nightmare of missing dependencies, mysterious errors, and packages that suddenly forget they exist. Nothing says "I've made terrible life choices" quite like watching your terminal spew 300 lines of errors because you dared to believe packaging would be straightforward. And the best part? After 4 hours of debugging, you'll end up with an .exe file roughly the size of the entire Lord of the Rings extended trilogy.

Content Your first podcast will be awful Your first video will be awful Your first article will be awful Your first art will be awful Your first photo will be awful Your first game will be awful But your first code will be perfect. Zero bugs and a very clean code. It will be "Hello World"

Sure, AI can build your app in 5 minutes instead of 5 hours, but have fun debugging that spaghetti junction of code! The left shows a nice, simple railway track—straightforward code built without AI. Clean, predictable, gets you from A to B. The right? That's your AI-generated "masterpiece"—a chaotic mess of intersecting tracks going in seventeen different directions at once. Your app might be built faster, but good luck figuring out which track leads where when everything crashes. It's like asking a hyperactive octopus to organize your closet. Speed isn't everything when you're spending the next month untangling what your AI "helper" thought was a brilliant solution!

Content Caitlin caithuls RELATIVE: You know about computers, right? ME (has a degree in computer science): No