requirements Memes

What? I Pressed The Key...

What? I Pressed The Key...
Instructions say "press any key" and your brain immediately goes to the nuclear option. The power button is technically a key, right? Just a really consequential one that ends your session in the most dramatic way possible. Game developers write "press any key" thinking you'll hit spacebar or enter like a normal person. Instead, you're out here treating it like a multiple choice question where all answers are correct, including the one that shuts down the entire system. Classic case of taking requirements too literally—a skill every developer knows intimately from dealing with QA reports and user feedback. The blinking confusion afterwards is just *chef's kiss*. "But... I followed the instructions?"

Scope Creep Speedrun!

Scope Creep Speedrun!
You start with a simple CRUD app. Just a basic form, maybe a login. Two weeks tops. Then the client casually drops "one extra feature" and suddenly you're implementing OAuth, real-time notifications, and a recommendation engine. Before you know it, someone mentions "procedural generation" and you're writing algorithms you barely understand. Then comes the final boss: "What about adding co-op?" Now you're dealing with WebSockets, conflict resolution, and questioning every life choice that led you to this moment. The makeup progression is chef's kiss—perfectly captures how your project transforms from clean and manageable into a full circus act. And you? You're the clown who said "yes" to everything.

Following Requirements Without Understanding Shit Is Dangerous

Following Requirements Without Understanding Shit Is Dangerous
Junior dev out here treating highway signs like user stories, blindly implementing what they see without understanding the CONTEXT. The sign says 35, so naturally they're cruising at 35 MPH on a 75 MPH highway like they're following sprint requirements to the letter. Meanwhile, the senior devs in the backseat are having full-blown panic attacks because they KNOW they just merged legacy code that's about to cause a catastrophic production incident. The beautiful irony? The junior is confidently wrong while the seniors are sweating bullets over their own technical debt. It's the circle of software development—juniors follow specs without thinking, seniors create specs they regret, and everyone ends up in therapy.

True Story Of Being A Developer

True Story Of Being A Developer
The three stages of developer enthusiasm. First panel: naive optimism. Second panel: the moment you realize they want you to build a spaceship but won't tell you if it needs to fly or just look pretty. Third panel: pure, unfiltered joy because no requirements means no one can tell you you're doing it wrong. You're not building what they want—you're building what they deserve for not writing a single user story.

When You Know What You Need AI Works Well Or The Power Of Hindsight

When You Know What You Need AI Works Well Or The Power Of Hindsight
Google engineer spends a year building distributed agent orchestrators, probably through countless architecture meetings, design docs, code reviews, and debugging sessions. Then Claude Code recreates it in an hour because someone finally knew how to describe what they actually wanted. The brutal truth: AI coding assistants are incredible when you already know the solution architecture. It's like having a junior dev who codes at 10x speed but needs crystal-clear requirements. The year-long project? That was figuring out what to build. The one-hour recreation? That was just typing it out with extra steps. Turns out the hard part of software engineering was never the coding—it was always the "what the hell are we actually building and why" part. AI just made that painfully obvious.

Bloated Ticket

Bloated Ticket
Nothing says "I care about this project" quite like a 47-paragraph ticket that reads like a doctoral thesis but was actually generated by ChatGPT in 3 seconds. You open it expecting clarity, instead you get five pages of corporate buzzwords, redundant acceptance criteria, and suspiciously perfect formatting. The real kicker? Buried somewhere in paragraph 23 is the actual requirement: "make button blue." Meanwhile you're sitting there like a rain-soaked anime protagonist, dead inside, knowing you'll have to parse through this AI slop to figure out what they actually want. The ticket looks impressive in standup though, so there's that.

Super SWE

Super SWE
So you're telling me this "Super SWE" role wants someone who's done something remarkable, ships features before breakfast, has "undeniable proof-of-talent," believes in manifesting physical engineering futures, AND has built exceptional UIs... but LinkedIn can't even generate a job match summary because there's not enough information? Classic. The job requirements read like a tech bro's fever dream written at 3 AM after watching too many startup documentaries. "Go from 0 → 1 on an idea before breakfast" – buddy, I can barely go from 0 → 1 cup of coffee before breakfast. And "manifesting the future of physical engineering"? What is this, a software job or a TED talk audition? Over 100 people clicked apply though. Either everyone's delusional about their qualifications or we're all just that desperate for remote work. Probably both.

Spec Is Just Code With A Fancy Hat

Spec Is Just Code With A Fancy Hat
Oh honey, the DELUSION is REAL! 💅 These poor souls thinking they've discovered some revolutionary concept where we'll just "write specifications" and *poof* - code appears! The absolute DRAMA when they realize that writing a "comprehensive and precise spec" is LITERALLY JUST WRITING CODE with extra steps! It's like saying "I've invented a way to avoid cooking - I'll just write extremely detailed instructions for someone else to follow!" Congratulations, you've invented a recipe, which is STILL COOKING! The programmer's smug "It's called code" at the end is sending me to the MOON! This is the software development equivalent of reinventing the wheel and calling it a "circular motion enablement device." I cannot with these people! 😂

When Requirements Are Technically Correct

When Requirements Are Technically Correct
The new developer took "Make the clock hands show the current time" a bit too literally. Instead of rotating analog hands, they just slapped the actual timestamp values onto the clock face. Classic case of malicious compliance meets unclear requirements! This is what happens when you inherit code with zero context and the documentation is just a Post-it note. The PM probably envisioned elegant rotating hands, but the dev thought "well technically these digital values DO show the current time..." and shipped it. Requirements passed, elegance failed.

Simple Cube vs. Sci-Fi Concept Art

Simple Cube vs. Sci-Fi Concept Art
The perfect visualization of how product managers describe features vs. how engineers implement them. Left: "Just a simple cube, how hard could it be?" Right: The same damn cube with one unnecessary line that took 8 meetings, 3 design revisions, and somehow doubled the development timeline. The sci-fi concept art is just corporate speak for "we added a groove that serves no purpose but looks techy." This is why I drink coffee by the gallon.

Clock But A Virus Prevents It From Rendering

Clock But A Virus Prevents It From Rendering
Look at this masterpiece of minimalist rendering. When your client says "I want a clock but I don't want to pay for the hands or numbers" and you deliver exactly what they asked for. The classic "works on my machine" meets "technically meets requirements." Somewhere, a product manager is furiously writing a more detailed spec while a developer is arguing that this is clearly a feature, not a bug. Time is just a social construct anyway.

Can A Robot Take Your Job?

Can A Robot Take Your Job?
The existential crisis every developer faces when AI enters the chat. We spend decades perfecting the art of turning vague client requirements into functional code, only for some robot to ask if we can even do our jobs anymore. That moment of self-reflection hits hard because we all know the truth – half our job is deciphering what "make it pop" actually means while the other half is Googling syntax we've forgotten for the fifth time this week. Meanwhile, ChatGPT is sitting there smugly generating entire codebases from prompts like "website but pretty pls." The audacity.