The Programmer’s Plight

The best thoughts come after 2 am, they said.
Yet now you lie, half-awake, half-dead,
Brain-fried and bleary-eyed, you sigh in defeat,
Tonight there will be no leaving this seat.

Pump up the caffeine, no pain no gain!
Get the hardcore glitch hop flowing through our veins
“Let’s do this!” we cry. “No time like the present!”
3 hours later do we realise – this bug ain’t so pleasant.

For the eighth time, you collapse on the desk in despair,
This close to tearing out your last strand of hair.
We’re on our own here bois, this is unchartered ground –
Not even r/learnprogramming threads were found.

Oh, but you know you’re close, it can’t be that far…
There’s just something fishy about this use of var
If we follow the traceback to the root of the issue
There must be some kind of typo or misuse

It’s somewhere in this regular expression
Probably some kind of circular rejection
Wait, is that supposed to be covariance?
This whole architecture just seems so precarious

Maybe a little fix here would fix that thing
NO EVERYTHING BROKE PANIC PANIC PANIC
Did you just find a bug in the compiler?
…why did the error count just increment higher??

That query’s wrong, it needs a JOIN
No wait, it’s fine, the right is typed void
Hold on, tf is this method returning
That inline note is a tad bit concerning…

Come on now, all we need is a bit of luck,
It’s time to reveal our secret weapon – the rubber duck!
“WHY WON’T IT WORK” you moan at its face,
Yet all that it does is sit there in its place.

Fine, let’s ask AI.
We’re already paying for it day and night.
Lovely, it gave you just what you need!
70 lines you do not want to read.

If only the integration tests would pass
Then you can finally go touch some grass
The tests are all failing! Red alert!
You lie there wailing, dead and inert.

Scramble to version history, let’s just rollback
Why did this website even need to scrolljack
Crap. How long ago did you last commit??
This workspace could be cleaned up a bit…

git reset --hard HEAD~2
There’s no way you just ran that. What did you just do.
git pull origin main, please work.
If not I’m gonna go fricking berserk

“All that down the drain? 2 years of work?”
Nah dude, it’s 24 months of pain, tears and hurt.
Are you dreaming? Is this even real?
Is that you screaming? Can you still feel?

Screw this, just type it as any, and call it a night
I’m sure by tomorrow everything’ll be alright
Not lost forever is our work, you hope.
Else we’re gonna need some serious cope.

Restless, you drift off into an uneasy sleep
Lethargic thoughts race and creep
In an asynchronous meshwork of multithreaded insanity,
Until suddenly you scramble up in light-headed profanity–

Why is the bug still here.
Lurking in the corner, invisible but near.
How many nights is this gonna take
With that pesky bugger keeping you awake?

What’s the time, you wonder? Just one look…
It’s almost daylight, you’re so cooked.
If we don’t get this wack schedule sorted
Soon we’ll find ourselves with no hair at forty.

By lunchtime you wake up an absolute mess
And drag yourself once more over to your desk.
Yeah, now you regret destroying your eyes
They’re so sore that even just blinking makes you cry

But what’s this? Suddenly the solution’s right there
Is this reality or yet one more nightmare?
Gone is the rage, the confusion, the sorrow
And left is a heart, broken and hollow.

Eternally shall the mind-killer haunt,
From #f00 pixels it unashamedly taunts;
The squiggly underline of a new bug detected:
“Syntax error on line 69: semicolon expected.”