Don't Touch It If It Works

That moment when you finish your "Hello World" tutorial and stare at the massive cargo ship of production code you're about to navigate. It's like bringing a water pistol to a tsunami. What they don't teach you in bootcamp: that cute little console.log is just the tip of a very deep, very scary iceberg filled with legacy code, tech debt, and config files that haven't been touched since 2012 because "nobody remembers what they do but everything breaks when you change them."

When your budget is $0 and your team is just you staring at a computer for 18 hours a day, you tend to wear a lot of hats. Independent game developers don't have the luxury of specialized roles - they're the entire credits sequence rolled into one sleep-deprived human. "Producer, Director, Actor, Editor, Writer, Visual Effects, Creative" isn't a panel discussion - it's Tuesday. The rest of the week looks suspiciously similar, except with more coffee stains and increasingly concerning Google searches like "how to make game when no sleep for 72 hours" and "is it normal for code to appear in dreams."

When your code review gets a perfect score for being absolutely terrifying. That's not a bug report, it's a trauma report. The reviewer gave it seven hearts because they're still alive to write the review, which is more than we can say for their sanity. Legacy codebases should come with this exact warning: "If you're a fan of spaghetti code, give it a shot. If you value your mental health, stay FAR away."

Content OK so l had 189 errors in code? yes fixed one so now its 188 right? 236 errors found

Someone discovered "vibe coding" with AI and thinks they're a developer now. Next week they'll discover what debugging AI-generated code is like when their app crashes in production and the error message is just "vibes were off." The honeymoon phase of AI coding always ends when you realize the AI confidently wrote 300 lines of beautiful nonsense that imports packages that don't exist.

Content What is the value in the variable? A: object Object undefined B: D: "42" NaN imoflip.com