coding Memes

Ah, the modern developer's time management philosophy! While Abraham Lincoln famously said he'd spend 6 hours sharpening an axe before cutting down a tree, today's devs spend 4 hours crafting the perfect AI prompt before writing any actual code. The joke brilliantly captures our current tech zeitgeist where "prompt engineering" has become its own discipline. We're no longer just coding—we're meticulously instructing AI to code for us, which somehow takes longer than coding ourselves. And let's appreciate the date stamp of 2025... when we'll apparently still be struggling with this balance. Some things never change!

The eternal struggle of AI prompting in three painful acts: First, some suit tells you to "get better at prompting" like it's your fault the AI hallucinated your database into oblivion. Then the AI nerds start throwing around fancy terms like "prompt engineering" and "context engineering" as if that's supposed to help. Meanwhile, the programmer in the corner is having an existential crisis because after decades of learning programming languages designed to be precise, we're now basically writing wish lists to an AI and hoping it understands our vibes. The irony that we've come full circle to desperately wanting a language that "tells the computer exactly what to do" isn't lost on anyone who's spent hours trying to get ChatGPT to format a simple JSON response correctly.

The telltale signs of AI assistance in your codebase are always there if you know where to look. Someone claims "Claude has been here," and the evidence? That cursed FINAL_SUMMARY.md file sitting in your repo root. It's like finding footprints in the snow - AI assistants and their weird habit of generating summary files nobody asked for. Eight PRs later and you're still finding random markdown files with perfect documentation that nobody on your team is skilled enough to have written.