Xkcd 1319 Memes

The eternal programmer's dilemma: spend 20 minutes doing a boring task once, or waste an entire weekend building an elaborate automation system you'll never touch again. It's not about efficiency—it's about avoiding the soul-crushing tedium of repetitive tasks while convincing yourself that your 36-hour automation marathon was "an investment." The irony? That script will sit in a folder somewhere, gathering digital dust, while you move on to automate the next thing you could have done manually in minutes. The worst part? We'll do it again next week. Because apparently we'd rather write 500 lines of code than click the same button twice.

The eternal developer dilemma: spend several hours automating a task that would take 5 minutes to do manually. Sure, the automation will save time... eventually... after the 84th run... in theory. But who's counting? Certainly not the developer crawling through the desert of inefficiency while ignoring the obvious oasis of just doing the damn thing.

The ultimate programmer flex: spending 10 days to automate a 10-minute task. It's not about efficiency—it's about sending a message to that repetitive task that dared to exist in your workflow. Sure, you could've saved 9 days, 23 hours, and 50 minutes of your life, but at what cost? Your dignity? The satisfaction of writing a script that will save you approximately 3 minutes per year for the next decade? The smug smile says it all: "Yes, I could've just done the task 1,440 times in the same timeframe, but my bash script is elegant ."