Your Friend Forgot How To Exit Vim

The evolutionary stages of developer brain expansion! Starting with the humble Notepad (barely firing neurons), progressing to VS Code (some decent neural activity), then leveling up to Vim (significant brain illumination), and finally reaching enlightenment with a custom text editor you built yourself. It's the coding equivalent of going from crawling to building your own rocket ship. The true mark of a developer isn't the code they write, but how unnecessarily complex they've made their text editing experience!

OH. MY. GOD. The absolute DEVOLUTION of programmers is too real! 😭 On the left, we have the CHAD programmer of yesteryear - building an ENTIRE OPERATING SYSTEM FROM SCRATCH, talking directly to God, and casually mentioning CIA conspiracies while coding in 640x480 resolution like some kind of digital BARBARIAN! And what do we have now? A pathetic little doge in a coffee sweater, TRAPPED in Vim, desperately clinging to Stack Overflow and Spotify for emotional support! Can't even exit a text editor without begging for help! The audacity! The TRAGEDY! For the uninitiated: TempleOS was an operating system coded entirely by one man (Terry Davis) who claimed divine inspiration. Meanwhile, Vim is that text editor where generations of programmers have been held hostage because nobody remembers how to exit it (it's :q! by the way, YOU'RE WELCOME).

The Vim initiation ritual – desperately smashing Esc, random key combos, and eventually grabbing your mouse in frustration because you have no idea how to exit . The true programmer's hazing ceremony. Eight years as a developer and I still sometimes open Vim by accident and feel that same panic. The only difference now is I know to yell ":q!" while crying slightly less.

Oh. My. GOD. The absolute COLLAPSE of programmer confidence is just TRAGIC! 💀 Left side: Matrix-inspired badass ready to bend reality, rewrite entire codebases, and basically be a coding GOD. Right side: Pathetic little creature TRAPPED in Vim, the text editor equivalent of Hotel California - you can check in but YOU CAN NEVER LEAVE! (It's :q! by the way, you poor soul.) We went from "I'll rewrite the entire Matrix" to "help me escape this terminal window" faster than you can say "legacy codebase." The AUDACITY of our past selves! The HUMILIATION of our present reality!

The eternal tech podcast dichotomy: hardcore engineer who lives in Vim vs. the polished host who hasn't touched code since jQuery was cool. Left side: Actually writes software that powers what you're watching on. Right side: Talks about software while secretly wondering if anyone will notice they forgot what a for-loop does. My favorite part? "Ran Doom on SMS Chipotle receipt" vs "1 peer-reviewed paper (removed by MIT)" is basically the two career paths available to CS graduates. The real punchline is we all know which one makes more money talking about programming than actually programming...

Behold the great decline of our noble profession. We went from muscle-bound legends who wrote code without AI crutches and built entire games in Assembly (because apparently pain is character-building) to modern keyboard jockeys who can't center a div without consulting Google for the 47th time today. The golden age programmer fixed memory leaks by hand, while we're over here begging ChatGPT to fix our syntax errors like it's our personal code therapist. And let's not forget the programmer trapped in Vim since 2018 because :q! is apparently harder to remember than differential calculus. The final insult? We fix one bug and create three more. It's not a development cycle, it's a pyramid scheme.