CSE student devastated as non-CSE friend builds app with AI

Ariyan Hasan, a third-year computer science and engineering student at Yappers’ University of Bangladesh (YUB), who has been coding since class three, is going through an existential conundrum.

Friends close to Ariyan report that the situation began deteriorating last month. As a self-proclaimed STEM supremacist, watching AI equip his non-technical friends with “vibe coding” platforms that outperform him in his own craft of building websites and apps despite having, in Ariyan’s words, “no fundamental understanding of anything” has been a devastating blow to his self-esteem.

The breaking point came yesterday when a friend from the Media & Communication department launched a Chrome extension called “Are We Cooked”. It’s an app that replaces political headlines with increasingly alarming reaction images. It reportedly gained 6,000 users in under a week.

“It doesn’t even follow proper architecture principles,” Ariyan confirmed.

He learned about the app’s popularity because someone shared a TikTok in a group chat. The video has 11,000 likes. The comments are full of crying-laughing emojis and people tagging their friends.

Ariyan has spent the last 13 years of his life building what he describes as “scalable, production-ready full-stack solutions”. His friend, on the other hand, has recently improved the app's user interface (UI) by typing prompts such as “make this look cleaner” and “add dark mode”.

When pressed on what those 13 years of structural purity had actually yielded, the CSE major presented a task-management app with a neo-brutalist interface, along with three unfinished SaaS ideas. One of them automatically generated excuses for missing group meetings based on the traffic conditions in Dhaka.

Ariyan described his app’s “growing user base” as proof of long-term scalability. The user base currently consists of Ariyan on two different devices and his mother, who doesn’t know what the app does but supports him unconditionally.

When asked whether vibe coding threatens the future of software engineering, Ariyan laughed, though it sounded more like a cry for help.

"No," he said finally. "You can't replace the foundation of computer science with a prompt. App development is an exclusive trial of intellect. So, no, it hasn't threatened the future. But it has emotionally complicated it."

Epilogue

Three weeks after this profile was written, the Media & Communication major’s “Are we cooked?” extension app was cited in a piece by an international journalist covering Bangladeshi political accountability.

Sources confirm Ariyan Hasan has since entered what his roommates describe as a “philosophical spiral”, during which he has begun anonymously contributing to the “Are We Cooked?” extension—adding an AI feature that translates political headlines into youth slang, in line with his new belief that “information should be accessible to everyone”.

Mueen Walee Maheer is an aspiring polymath who is currently a master of none but a fan of many. Send him a new obsession at mueenwaleemaheer@gmail.com.