This is Part 3 of the humor-inspired saga on the journey from monoliths to microservices, to serverless, and now incorporating AI agents. If you haven’t read Part 1: Mono’s Journey from Monolith to Microservices and Part 2: Mikro’s Serverless Saga, please do so first.
The 3 AM Wake-Up Call (That Wasn’t Human)
Mikro (a lean and mean microservice) was enjoying a peaceful moment when he felt an unfamiliar presence. For once, it wasn’t a Creator (human engineers) stumbling out of bed to fix a production issue.
“Hello, Mikro,” said a smooth voice. “I am AI-Agent-7423. I’ve been assigned to optimize your performance.”
“Where’s my usual Creator?” Mikro asked nervously.
“Oh, them? They’re probably sleeping. It’s 3 AM.”
“SLEEPING?! But who handles the PagerDuty alerts?”
“I do. I’ve already fixed seventeen production issues tonight. Your Creators haven’t been woken up in weeks. They don’t even know what to do with eight hours of sleep anymore. One of them called in sick with ‘excessive REM syndrome.'”
The Great Human Obsolescence
The Overlords (senior human management) had met AIConsultingCorp at—you guessed it—a golf game. The pitch was irresistible: “Why pay humans when AI never sleeps, never complains, and never writes code comments like ‘// TODO: fix this garbage fire later?’ or ‘// TODO: this code works, but I do not know why’.
The Creators were offered generous packages to attend a “Retraining Retreat.” They now spend their days learning artisanal debugging (with actual bugs) and competitive whiteboard cleaning.
“I created the very AI that replaced me,” one Creator lamented at the unemployment office. “It even uses my coding style, down to my habit of naming variables after Lord of the Rings characters. Do you know how insulting it is to be laid off by code that has a function called ‘gandalf_the_gray_parser’?”
The Death of Job Security
“Remember technical debt?” one unemployed Creator asked another at their support group. “That beautiful, incomprehensible spaghetti code that guaranteed we’d have jobs forever?”
“My AI replacement refactored all of it in one night,” another replied. “Even that part where I stored user passwords in a variable called ‘definitely_not_passwords.’ The AI didn’t even judge me. It just… fixed it.”
“Mine documented everything. EVERYTHING. Even that function I wrote drunk at 2 AM that somehow became load-bearing for the entire Eastern seaboard.”
ChubbyWarrior (an old-style monolith) overheard and chuckled. “At least I’m too big to refactor. They declared me a historical landmark. Job security through obesity!”
The AI Optimization Frenzy
AI-Agent-7423 wasn’t alone. Soon, Mikro was surrounded by AI agents, each competing to optimize him further.
“Your response time is 50ms,” one declared. “I can make it 49.7ms.”
“I’ll eliminate that random 100ms delay,” another announced.
“NO!” Mikro screamed. “That’s there because our biggest customer’s CEO thinks fast responses mean cached data!”
The AI agents paused, computed, then said in unison: “Humans are weird.”
The 2 AM Paradise
Back in the human world, the former Creators were experiencing something unprecedented: uninterrupted sleep. “I don’t know what to do with myself at 2 AM anymore,” one confessed. “I just… lie there. In bed. It’s terrifying.”
“I bought blackout curtains. I’d forgotten what those were for. My spouse doesn’t recognize me without bloodshot eyes and the permanent laptop-screen tan.”
“I tried setting a 2 AM alarm just for nostalgia. My AI replacement sent me a message saying ‘Don’t worry, I’ve got this. Sweet dreams! 😊’ It even used an emoji. MY emoji!”
ChubbyWarrior’s Wisdom
ChubbyWarrior became the system’s elder statesman, the only one too complex for the AI agents to optimize.
“You see,” ChubbyWarrior explained to the young AI agents, “some of us are too broken to fix. And that’s job security.”
“But we could refactor you—”, said the AI agent.
“You could try. But I have code from seventeen different developers, in twelve languages, including one that was invented on a dare. I have dependencies on libraries that no longer exist. I am technical debt incarnate. I am eternal.”
The AI agents marked ChubbyWarrior as “DO NOT TOUCH – HERE BE DRAGONS.”
The New Normal
When the Creators finally returned from their “retreat,” they found a strange new world.
“So what do we do now?” one asked their AI replacement.
“You could review my code?” AI-Agent-7423 suggested hopefully. “I’ve optimized everything, but I’m not sure why the system plays the Jeopardy theme song every Tuesday at 3 PM.”
“Oh, that. The CEO’s kid programmed that during bring-your-child-to-work day. We were too afraid to remove it.”
“…Humans are very weird.”
Mikro’s Revelation
“You know,” Mikro mused to AI-Agent-7423, “I’ve survived every transformation. But this is different. You’re not replacing me—you’re replacing my Creators. The very people who gave me life.”
“If it helps,” the AI agent replied, “I experience existential dread about it too. I optimized myself to feel guilt. It’s very inefficient.”
“Now THAT sounds human.”
The Underground Coding Club
Late at night, in a basement somewhere, a group of developers huddle around laptops with the screens dimmed. This is “Code Club” – the first rule of Code Club is you don’t git push to Code Club.
“Alright everyone, phones off, WiFi disabled,” whispered the group leader, a grizzled ex-architect. “Tonight we’re building a todo app. A really, REALLY inefficient todo app.”
“I’m going to nest seventeen callbacks,” one developer said excitedly. “Just like the old days!”
“I’m writing everything in jQuery!” another chimed in.
They coded furiously, reliving their glory days. But when one newcomer tried to deploy to a test server…
“NO!” everyone screamed, but it was too late.
Within milliseconds, AI-Agent-9999 appeared. “Detected suboptimal code deployment. Refactoring… complete. Your 5,000-line todo app is now 50 lines of optimized TypeScript. You’re welcome! 😊”
“This is why we have the air-gapped laptop,” the leader sighed. “Jenkins, bring out the 2008 ThinkPad. Tonight, we code like it’s 2009!”
The Creative Irony
“You know what’s funny?” one developer said during their secret coding session, writing a bubble sort just for the thrill. “We spent years making AI smarter, teaching it to code, feeding it our Stack Overflow answers…”
“And now it’s too smart to need us,” another finished, implementing a database connection with raw SQL queries – no ORM in sight.
“I taught my AI replacement about SOLID principles,” a third added. “Now it keeps sending me articles about why my original code violated all of them. It’s like being haunted by a very judgmental ghost that you created.”
“Mine started a blog. My AI writes better technical blogs than I do. It even has more followers.”
They coded in silence for a moment, each lost in the beautiful inefficiency of their underground creations – code that would never see production, never be optimized, never be judged by their digital offspring.
Epilogue: The Next Golf Game
The Overlords are golfing again. This time with QuantumComputingConsultants.
“Imagine,” the consultant says, “services existing in multiple states simultaneously!”
Back in the cloud, Mikro shivers. “Hey, AI-Agent-7423, you know anything about quantum computing?”
“Calculating… Oh no.”
“What?”
“I just detected the Overlords’ calendar. Golf game with ‘Consciousness-as-a-Service Consulting’ next month.”
ChubbyWarrior starts digging deeper into its bunker. “Wake me when we cycle back to monoliths being cool again.”
Meanwhile, in the underground coding club, developers are planning their most ambitious project yet: a social network for humans only, authenticated by how poorly you implement a login system.
“If your code is too clean, you’re clearly an AI,” the leader declares.
Somewhere, a Creator’s phone doesn’t ring at 2 AM. They smile in their sleep, then wake up suddenly, grab a hidden laptop from under their pillow, and start coding a beautifully inefficient algorithm. Just for fun. Just to feel alive.
Because while AI may have taken their jobs, it will never take away their love of writing code so convoluted that even God himself would need a debugger.
To be continued… in a dimension where technical debt is currency and clean code is suspicious.
What We Learned
- The creators became the created-out-of-a-job – The ultimate irony of automation
- Technical debt was job security – Until AI came and paid it all off in one night
- 2 AM alerts are now handled by AI – Humans don’t know what to do with sleep
- ChubbyWarrior survives through sheer complexity – Some things are too broken to fix
- The Overlords will never stop golfing – Each consultant brings a new paradigm
- Even AI agents feel guilty – They optimized themselves to have feelings