Tech cycles Memes

The circle of life, but make it tech. Strong men build C, which gives us the good times of memory management and segfaults. Those good times spawn Python, which spawns AI hype, which spawns "vibe coding" (presumably where you just ask ChatGPT to do everything). Vibe coding produces weak men who can't center a div without an AI assistant. Weak men bring bad times—production outages, npm install taking 47 minutes, that sort of thing. Bad times forge strong men again, and the cycle continues. It's the tech industry's version of that ancient philosophical cycle, except instead of empires rising and falling, it's programming languages and developer competence. We went from manually allocating memory to asking an LLM "how do I reverse a string" and somehow both eras think they're the pinnacle of engineering.