The Arsonist Firefighter Syndrome

Oh, welcome to modern programming—where your IDE is just a browser with five AI tabs open. Remember when we used to debug our own code? Now we're just glorified AI wranglers, making the machines fight each other for the best solution. The truly painful part isn't even the AI dependency—it's the brutal self-awareness at the end. "It's me." Yeah buddy, it's all of us now. We've evolved from Stack Overflow copy-paste artists to AI response evaluators. Progress? Next week we'll just have AIs asking other AIs and cut out the middleman entirely. My job security is weeping in the corner.

Content Nicholas C. Zakas slicknet "Don't be too clever," is one of my mantras. "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian Kernighan 4:48 AM Mar 24, 2016 912 905 people are Tweeting about this

Two senior devs staring intensely at a screen trying to center a div - the most elusive achievement in CSS. Eight years of experience, six-figure salaries, and yet here they are... squinting at margins and padding like they're deciphering ancient hieroglyphics. The eternal frontend struggle captured in feline form. After trying flexbox, grid, and 17 StackOverflow solutions, they'll eventually just add margin: 0 auto and call it "responsive design."

The eternal battle between descriptive variable naming and mathematical brevity! Your pair programmer whips out for (int i = 0; i followed by double λ = 0.5; and int Δt = 10; and you're suddenly transported back to college nightmares. Clean code zealots clutch their copies of "Clean Code" while math-heavy programmers argue "but θ is OBVIOUSLY the angle parameter!" The true horror isn't the single letters—it's realizing you'll need to decipher this cryptic alphabet soup during the 3 AM production bug six months later when the original author is vacationing in Tahiti.

Four years of programming and still feeling like an imposter? Welcome to the club. The cat's face says it all—blank stare of existential dread when someone assumes you know things. The tech industry runs on Stack Overflow and caffeine, not actual knowledge. Just smile and nod while frantically Googling "how to center a div" for the 500th time.

Content The Giant bug I still don't want to fix Me Fixing a typo in the README