Fundamentals Memes

So we've reached the point where "coders" who can't function without AI assistance are being told they have no business shipping software. The brutal honesty here is refreshing. It's like watching someone realize their entire skillset is just being really good at prompting ChatGPT. The vibe shift is real. We went from "AI will replace all programmers" to "if you need AI to write every line, you're not actually a programmer" faster than you can say "stack overflow copy-paste." Sure, AI is a tool—but if you can't debug, architect, or understand what the AI just generated, you're basically a glorified middleman between a language model and production. Tony Stark energy: "Learn the fundamentals or get out of my codebase."

The AI hype cycle speedrun, perfectly captured in four stages of clown makeup. Started with the promise that AI would revolutionize everything, got seduced into thinking you could skip fundamentals and just prompt your way to a senior dev salary. Then reality hit: those "free" AI tools either got paywalled harder than Adobe Creative Cloud or started running slower than a nested loop in Python. Now you're sitting there with zero transferable skills, a LinkedIn full of AI buzzwords, and the crushing realization that "prompt engineer" isn't actually a career path. The kicker? While you were vibing, the devs who actually learned their craft are still employed. Turns out you can't Ctrl+Z your way out of not knowing how a for-loop works.

Oh. My. GAWD. The absolute BETRAYAL of every AI enthusiast right here! 💔 You spend MONTHS drooling over fancy machine learning algorithms, only to have pure mathematics saunter by with that knowing smirk that says "honey, I was here first." The AUDACITY of math to just show up and remind everyone that all those neural networks are just glorified calculus in a trench coat! And don't even get me started on how we've all abandoned our first love (mathematics) for the hot new thing that's basically just... math with extra steps. The DRAMA! The SCANDAL!

Just sitting back with my popcorn watching the AI hype train derail in slow motion. All these devs who pivoted their entire careers to "prompt engineering" are about to discover what us old-timers already know - there's no shortcut to understanding the fundamentals. When the hallucinations pile up and the VC money dries out, guess who'll be debugging the mess? The same people who've been writing actual code for decades. Munching carrots while watching careers burn is my new hobby.

Remember when we spent hours implementing binary trees and sorting algorithms from scratch? Now there's a line of developers sprinting toward ChatGPT while the "Data Structures & Algorithms" door collects dust. Why bother with Big O notation when you can just prompt engineer your way to a solution? The irony is we still need those fundamentals to understand if ChatGPT's code will crash and burn in production. But hey, who has time for that when deadlines are yesterday?