Programmer's Creed: The Beautiful Lie

The eternal bait-and-switch of programming life. You start a project thinking "I'll just use this simple framework" or "This should only take an afternoon," and suddenly it's 3 weeks later and you're deep in Stack Overflow threads from 2013 trying to figure out why your perfectly reasonable code is being interpreted as an arcane summoning ritual. The optimism-to-despair pipeline is the most reliable infrastructure in tech.