The Fourth Forbidden Wish: Good Documentation
Description
A two-panel comic strip featuring a genie-like character with a white turban and a person in a green shirt. In the first panel, the genie explains the standard three rules for wishes: "-no wishing for death", "-no falling in love", and "-no bring back dead people". In the second panel, the person makes their wish: "Good Documentation for literally anything". The panel is split diagonally, showing the genie interrupting with a stern expression, saying, "There are 4 rules". This meme uses the classic genie format to humorously express a deep-seated frustration in the software development world: the perceived impossibility of obtaining good, comprehensive documentation. The joke is that this desire is so unattainable, it transcends the genie's otherwise immense power, resonating with any developer who has struggled with poorly documented code, APIs, or systems
Comments
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Genies can't grant good documentation for the same reason we can't write it: by the time you've described the system's current state, it's already a legacy system with three breaking changes
Genie’s fourth rule: documentation can only approach eventual consistency with the codebase - by the time it catches up, the schema’s already sharded itself again
The documentation says "3 simple steps to deploy" but step 2 is "configure the 47 environment variables (see appendix B, which references appendix D, which is TODO)"
The real magic isn't bringing back dead people - it's finding documentation that accurately describes what the code *actually* does after three years of undocumented refactoring, two team turnovers, and a migration to microservices that nobody bothered to update the wiki for
Genies cap restrictions at three; good docs demand four because edge cases always sneak in that extra rule
Good docs are a CAP problem: current, complete, and correct - pick two, until the next hotfix
Good documentation has its own CAP theorem: Current, Accurate, and Complete - pick two; after the next deploy, pick none