"Back in the Good Old Days" or The IT Mandela Effect: How We Suddenly Remembered "Flawless" Pre-AI Code 🤡
My feed is suddenly flooded with heartwarming posts claiming that "only a living, breathing, artisanal programmer can write real, proper code." The narrative goes that these LLMs spit out nothing but hallucinations, hacks, and spaghetti, whereas a Human Dev is an absolute Hallmark of Quality.
Hold on, I’m having massive deja vu here. Let’s take off the rose-colored glasses for a second and reminisce about that golden era before AI could even generate a "hello world', when the world was ruled exclusively by Meatbags.
Oh, what a legendary time it was!
Impeccable Architecture: Naturally, every single system built before 2023 was architected by absolute visionaries. No distributed monoliths disguised as microservices. No "let’s just throw a shared database between ten services because it’s faster." The architecture was as pristine and polished as a Greek temple. (Not).
A Bug-Free Utopia: Software literally never crashed before AI arrived. Nobody ever deployed a five-line hotfix on a Friday evening that nuked a major bank’s production environment. NullPointerException? Never heard of its. Memory leaks? Marketing myths. Human programmers wrote code that ran for centuries without a single restart.
Documentation as an Art Form: Every legacy project used to welcome you with flawless Swagger UI and meticulous descriptions for every single method. You definitely never encountered that sacred comment: // DO NOT TOUCH, I DO NOT KNOW HOW IT WORKS REALLY left by a tech lead who quit five years ago.
Flawless Time Management: Meatbag developers always estimated tasks perfectly. If they said "it will take two days," it took two days. No burnouts, no six-month deadline extensions, and no endless refactoring just for the sake of refactoring.
Let’s be real for a moment: For decades, we, the living humans, have selflessly engineered metric tons of premium, unreadable, -over-under-engineered garbage code. We built enterprise systems out of duct tape and prayers, hoping to god the Docker container wouldn't sneeze during a restart.
And then AI came along. It compiles code at the speed of light, doesn't ask for free snacks, doesn't argue about code style during syncs, and... spits out roughly the same average level of nonsense that juniors (and half the seniors) used to copy-paste from StackOverflow anyway.
The only difference is that now we have the perfect scapegoat. Before, a bug was always the fault of "that idiot developer who worked here before me." Now, it’s just "that stupid neural network."
Breathe out, colleagues. The human programmer is indeed irreplaceable. After all, someone needs to possess the sheer abstract thinking and audacity required to deploy the absolute chaos generated by AI straight into production- and then courageously fix it until 5 AM. A real AI just isn't built for that level of madness...🙂 Have a nice weekend.