Damned If You Do, Damned If You Code

Ah, the classic "Google search suggestions" meme with Pepe looking concerned. Nothing like society's collective search history to remind us where we stand in the pecking order. After 20 years in this industry, I can confirm we're all just weird losers who jump at the sound of a production alert. The "not engineers" one hits particularly hard for those of us who spent $100K on CS degrees only to be told "real engineers build bridges." The truth hurts, but at least we can afford therapy with our six-figure salaries that we spend entirely on mechanical keyboards and energy drinks.

The gambling industry and AI coding have more in common than your bank account would like to admit. Both involve throwing money at a system with questionable odds of success. Sure, one involves tokens instead of chips, but the dopamine hit when your prompt actually works is suspiciously similar to hitting triple sevens. The real kicker is how we lie to ourselves. "One more prompt and this bug will disappear" is just the programmer's version of "one more spin and I'll win it all back." Meanwhile, the cursor blinks mockingly as you realize you've spent four hours trying to get an AI to write a function that would've taken you 20 minutes to code yourself. Congratulations on your new career as a "prompt engineer." It's just gambling with better LinkedIn optics.

Content Me after a day of convincing my team leader we don't need to a wrapper around that open source

The eternal cycle of developer disappointment: find a promising tutorial, only to discover it was written when dinosaurs roamed the internet. Nothing quite captures the soul-crushing despair of trying to follow instructions that reference libraries abandoned by their own creators. The best part? Spending 3 hours debugging just to realize the tutorial was written for a version that's now considered archaeological evidence.

Content My brain when I'm coding and people are watching My brain when I'm coding alone My brain when I'm not coding My brain when I'm about to sleep

Content for (thing in a, b, c) doThingwith(thing); doThingWith(a); doThingWith(b); doThingWith(c); 34 34 doThingWith(a); doThingWith(b); doThingWith(c); 14 14 0.1 10 score 55 2 2 70 85 100 115 130 0.1 145