You know you've made it in tech when you realize your entire job is just being middleware. Claude (or any AI tool) does the actual work, your manager takes the credit, and you're stuck in the middle translating between "can you make it pop more?" and actual executable code. The real kicker? APIs are supposed to be stateless, but here you are carrying emotional baggage from every sprint review. You're basically a REST endpoint that returns 200 OK while internally screaming 500 Internal Server Error. Fun fact: Unlike actual APIs, you don't get to deprecate yourself or return a 429 Too Many Requests when your manager Slacks you for the fifth time asking "quick question" at 6 PM on a Friday.