Everyone wants a demon bursting through the ground in an explosion of lava. There are classes for that. Nobody has ever asked for a scarf in our game, and our code doesn’t even know what a neck is.
this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2026
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More people want scarves than they considered. Doesn't mean no one wants it, means they didn't consider their audience.
I was answering this as a dev and designer. That’s why this is more work.
My head canon is that this comic made people work harder on image recognition.
Ended up closer to several departments and 10.
“Yikes”
I had a client who thought I was a miracle worker for changing the color of every link on the site in under an hour.
Then he got mad because it took me three days to add one field to a form.
Most people cannot begin to comprehend that just having the field on the form doesn’t magically make it do anything. Like, yeah, I can add a field to the form in five minutes, but if you want it to actually work, it’ll take time.
Dotcom days, my company charged a venue $30k for an "emergency change" to disable a form and all links to it.
The dev already had a system switch for it. $30k, 10-second change.
Foresight FTW.
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Design mock ups are the bane of my existence.
What do you mean it’ll take 6 months…you have almost all the work done in your demo.
I made some buttons that navigate between pages that have laid out controls on them. Other than those specific navigations…nothing works.
a {
color: pink;
}
And then you realize that the previous programmer abused the anchors to build all of the buttons.
And 50% of the styles are marked as !important
Not important? Sounds good to me.
(I hate that notation)
Hey it's not my fault, this project was started in 2018 and they choose to use bootstrap.
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To be fair to the client, I, as a programmer, often struggle to estimate tasks with accuracy, and am very often at a loss at even explaining to co-workers why some things are easy and others impossible.
I once just asked how long if would take them to swap the chair and the table, and how long it would take to swap the window and that pillar. After all, it's just moving stuff around. They understood after that.
Careful, that table is critical for getting airflow over that server in the corner. If you move the table it will overheat and cause a cascade of failures and bankrupt the entire company.
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He was okay when I explained that the custom Magento plugin was written in Bulgarian and I had to translate it before attempting to understand the convoluted mess I’d been given.
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I'm sad that the relevant xkcd is kinda obsolete now (because it's been long enough for that research team to finish doing its thing).
Google photos is alarmingly good at object and individual recognition. It'll probably be used by the droid war killbots to distinguish "robot" from "human with bucket on head."
Immich blows Google photos completely out of the water on this, and all locally.
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Reminds me on how they had a single person (I think?) doing Batman’s cape for the Arkham games. That was their position, the person who makes the cape seem like a real piece of cloth.
I still think about how good the cape looked when flowing or in movement. They did an amazing job either way!
For Assassins Creed Black Flag they had an entire team of like 14 people just making sure the ocean looked pretty.
In very early 2000s my friends and I used to comment on water appearance in games. If I saw Black Flag ocean then I'd have probably shit myself. Really water was a benchmark between us still recall it on the amd 9500
and then a decade later they did Skull and Bones and somehow it looks way way worse
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First Dev: "Oof. Uh...hm. Ok. So...no, give me a second, I'm thinking...So, the player character already has an attribute for a familiar that we're not using, since we removed familiars from the game. We could use that as a scarf, I think. One of the options was a tiger that walked next to the character, we could translate that up and around to the neck. Animation would be tough...could we come up with some reason why the scarf sticks to his shirt? ...no? How about a reason why it's always fluttering behind him? ...ok. So yeah, that should work...I think. We're a month out from code freeze, so we won't be able to do much with it other than put it in."
After launch
Project Manager: "Hey, people on Twitch have discovered that some of the player's clothes disappear randomly if you lose to the lich in level six...?"
Second Dev: "Weird. I'll take a look..."
Second Dev, in Slack: "Hey, does anyone know why all of the neck-slot customization items are coded as cats? Turns out the Dog Lich still deletes cat familiars if you lose to it."
removed familiars
:(
Been there, so many times.
Late in Perfect Dark Zero’s development (a complete shitshow to get launched for X360 day 1) we added something called “kill planes”, behind which all entities would get nuked. The aim was that you would physically move through the world and eventually get to “no turning back” points, behind which we could remove all entities to save some cycles.
Turns out there were a large amount of places that assumed that once they had a pointer to an entity that pointer would remain valid.
So yeah, code that was like “I’ll just flip this bit on this entity I kept track of” was now flipping random bits on memory.
These were fun to chase down.
In the end we inplemented NoTaD pointers (“notified on target destruction”, essentially weak pointers but this was back in the day when weak pointers and smart pointers weren’t really well defined) that would discover when the thing they took a precious pointer to was actually no longer valid.
I want to hear so many more of these stories.
In the end we inplemented NoTaD pointers (“notified on target destruction”, essentially weak pointers but this was back in the day when weak pointers and smart pointers weren’t really well defined) that would discover when the thing they took a precious pointer to was actually no longer valid.
It's weird to me that programming practice has changed that much in 20 years. That's still closer to today than to Dennis Richie doing his thing.
Also a cautionary tale on adding and removing features without plan or controls. Every 'hey could we add...? It's what everyones talking about!' is another step taken away from the design.
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I appreciate the joke, but the rules are exactly why they go "oof". The scarf has higher requirements for precision and a more constant overhead than a one-off giant summon.
You could make them go "oof" on the summon if you added a requirement that the lava properly flow along the ground and interact with all characters near the event.
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