The Inevitable Regret of No Documentation
Description
A meme showing three overlapping, concerned-looking images of Joe Biden. The text at the top reads, "Me looking at my code 6 months after convincing my manager that we don't need documentation." This visual format, often used to convey confusion and self-reflection, perfectly captures the developer's dawning horror upon returning to a complex, undocumented project. The joke lands with senior developers who have experienced this exact scenario: the short-term win of skipping documentation leads to long-term pain, making code difficult to maintain, debug, or extend. It's a classic tale of hubris and its consequences, where "future you" pays the price for "past you's" shortcuts. The watermark "THAT_SOUTHERN_DUDE" is visible at the bottom left
Comments
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The only thing more cryptic than undocumented legacy code is the commit message from six months ago that just says 'fixes'
Amazing how “the code is the documentation” expires exactly when your brain’s LRU cache evicts the whole module - apparently the TTL is six months
The three stages of grief when you realize that 'self-documenting code' is just technical debt with a marketing degree, and your past self was essentially running a Ponzi scheme against your future productivity
Ah yes, the classic 'self-documenting code' argument - where 'self-documenting' actually means 'I'll definitely remember why I wrote this Byzantine state machine with three nested ternaries when I'm context-switching back from the payment gateway rewrite.' Six months later, you're essentially doing archaeological excavation on your own tomb, except the hieroglyphics are variable names like `tmp2` and `handleStuff()`. The real kicker? You'll spend more time reverse-engineering your own clever abstractions than it would've taken to write a decent README and some inline comments explaining why you needed that cursed reflection hack to work around the framework's lifecycle. Future you sends their regards - and a Jira ticket
The real tech debt interest: compound confusion, turning 'self-documenting code' into an archaeological dig
We saved two hours by “not writing docs”; six months later, comprehension is O(months) and the only consumer of that undocumented API is future‑me - with no ADRs, no runbook, and a commit history that reads like Kafka
We saved two days by skipping docs; now every ticket starts with an unscheduled RFC - Reverse‑Engineering From Commits, with me as both author and archaeologist
Last time I had this I just felt like the code is shit, so I rewrote it from scratch, and now whenever I come to it again I just get a hang of it much faster Comment deleted
Of rewriting it again?💀 Comment deleted
yeeeeees agn! Comment deleted
just stop writing bad code, and you wont have this problem 😇 Comment deleted
It was good at the time you write it lol Comment deleted
absolutely not Comment deleted
Premature optimization is the root of all evil Comment deleted
the full quote is "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%." btw Comment deleted
and that's why 97% of my code is a shit that never gets properly written the first time Comment deleted
I wasn't talking about optimization. The point is, that you should write a self-explanatory code and you will be fine. Comment deleted
I mean, it is like you add some intricate internal logic and naming things or following semantics becomes very hard Comment deleted
And you perhaps never implement O(logn) solution straight away if there's easy O(n) Comment deleted
I have deadlines to adhere, maintaining the code can be done later Comment deleted
Not to mention that you're not meant to write perfectly optimized and good code the first time around Comment deleted
You'll waste so much time thinking about it rather than doing it Comment deleted
how does this relevant to Biden? Comment deleted