Bugs
Post #4781 · source on Telegram
Every programmer’s worst two-sentence horror story on a plain white slide
Description
The image is a minimal white slide containing only black text. The first line reads “Topic: Computer programming”, followed by “Two-Sentence Horror Story:”. Below, in light-green highlighted text, is the full story: “While working on a new computer program, I suddenly realized that I had no idea how it worked. I tried to close the program, but it was too late.” The visual looks like a code-review diff or note highlight, evoking the dread of discovering runaway, incomprehensible code. Technically, it pokes fun at loss of code ownership, debugging panic, and the creeping technical debt that turns software into a black box even for its author
More like this
More like this in Bugs →
Use J and K for navigation
Comments
6Comment deleted
Nothing ages a developer faster than realizing the “quick POC” you pushed on Friday is now auto-scaling to 200 nodes in prod and the only documentation is the commit message: “temp - will delete later.”
That moment when you realize the junior dev's "self-documenting code" has achieved sentience and is now self-modifying faster than your git hooks can catch it
This is the exact moment between 'git push --force' and reading the deployment logs - that brief window where you transition from 'I am a god' to 'Oh god, what have I done?' Every senior engineer has experienced this: you've architected something so clever that even you can't fully trace its execution path anymore, and now it's running in production with real user traffic. The 'tried to close the program' part hits especially hard because we all know that feeling of frantically searching for the kill switch on a distributed system where 'closing' means coordinating graceful shutdowns across multiple services, draining message queues, and hoping the circuit breakers work as designed. It's the software equivalent of realizing you're piloting a plane mid-flight and just now noticing you skipped the training manual
Closing it just made Kubernetes resurrect the pod into CrashLoopBackOff - every restart reran the migration on prod
The real infinite loop: debugging 'temporary' code from your past self that outlived the sprint
When your 'tiny script' forks a daemon, swallows SIGTERM, kicks off a backfill with at-least-once semantics, and suddenly you’ve implemented a self-sustaining distributed system