Simpler-times Memes

Remember when you actually understood every line of code you wrote? When you'd spend hours manually implementing collision detection for your janky platformer, debugging by adding print statements, and feeling like an absolute wizard when your little sprite finally moved across the screen? Now we've got AI writing half our code, frameworks doing the other half, and IDEs that are smarter than we are. Sure, you can ship a full-stack app in a weekend, but can you honestly say you know what's happening under the hood? There's something bittersweet about trading the pure joy of building a simple game from scratch in Sublime Text for the "efficiency" of letting an LLM generate boilerplate while you pretend to understand the 47 dependencies it just installed. Progress is great and all, but sometimes you just want to go back to when programming felt like crafting instead of orchestrating.