The Committee

Satan convened the Infernal Committee on Applied Suffering in the usual chamber, which had been redecorated in open-plan.

"Programmers," he said. "We're losing them. They arrive, they look around at the lake of fire, and they say 'at least it's not Microsoft Teams.' I want something new. Something native."

The First Proposal

The first demon rose. Baalphegor, Duke of Latency, eight hundred years in the Department of Minor Inconveniences.

"My lord. Semicolons." He let it land. "The compiler reports the error on line four hundred and twelve. The missing semicolon is on line eleven."

A murmur. Satan steepled his claws. "Go on."

"That's the whole thing."

"That's Tuesday, Baalphegor. They have linters now. They have little red squiggles. You're describing a solved problem and calling it damnation." He waved a hand. "Sit down. Think bigger."

The Second Proposal

The second demon unfurled - Malacoda, who had done excellent work on printer drivers in the nineties.

"Then let it be flaky tests." She spread her wings for emphasis. "The suite passes locally. It fails in CI. They re-run it. It passes. They commit nothing, change nothing, and it fails again - on a different test."

Genuine appreciation moved through the chamber. Satan nodded slowly, and then stopped nodding.

"It's good," he admitted. "It's good. But there's an exit. Eventually one of them reads the logs, finds the shared mutable state, and fixes it. They learn, Malacoda. They go home having grown as a person." He grimaced. "Do you know what growth is? It's the opposite of Hell."

The Third Proposal

The third demon did not stand. He had been in the corner the entire meeting, and no one could afterward agree on when he'd arrived.

"I don't need a new torment," he said. "They already built it. I only want permission to stop helping them with it."

"Explain."

"A man has written his work. Two commits. Good commits - he removed what wasn't needed, which is the only honest thing a programmer ever does. He goes to send it upstream." The demon's voice did not rise. "The remote tells him: you are not allowed to push to master."

"Not that he is wrong. Not that the work is bad. Simply that the door he has been walking through for eleven years is, today, not for him."

Satan leaned forward.

"So he makes a branch. Pushes that instead. And he discovers that the branch he built his work on - develop, the branch everyone told him was the main branch - has not been touched since July of 2018. Fifty-four commits sideways from master. Nineteen commits behind it. They parted ways in 2016 and no one told him, because the only two people who knew have since left the company."

"He cherry-picks onto master."

"It conflicts. Of course it conflicts. The files he cleaned up were renamed in 2019 and deleted in 2022 and reintroduced under a different casing last March by someone who has also left."

A low sound ran around the chamber. Several junior demons were taking notes.

"So he resets. And here is the part I'd like you to appreciate, my lord." The demon finally looked up. "He types git reset --hard. Git does not ask him if he's sure. Git does not say 'this will destroy four hours of work.' Git says nothing at all, and returns him to a clean prompt, and the cleanliness of that prompt is the cleanest thing he will ever see."

"The work is gone?"

"The work is recoverable," the demon said, "via git reflog. Which he will learn about in eight months, from a stranger, in a comment thread, on a question that is not his."

Satan was quiet for a while.

"And the detached HEAD?"

"He's in it right now. He doesn't know yet. He's made three commits."

"The unborn branch? The empty repo that insists it cannot find HEAD, a thing it is currently holding- "

	HEAD
	fatal: ambiguous argument 'HEAD': unknown revision or path not in the working tree.

"On the Linux box. Yes. He's been staring at that for twenty minutes and has begun, quietly, to wonder whether he is any good at this."

The Ruling

Satan stood. The committee stood with him.

"Approved," he said. "All of it. But I want one change."

The third demon waited.

"The error messages." Satan's smile, when it came, was almost tender. "Make them technically accurate. Every one of them. Let every single message be a true and precise description of what has gone wrong - and let not one of them, in all the ages of the world, contain the faintest suggestion of what to do about it."

"My lord-"

"And Baalphegor." Satan did not turn around. "Write the documentation."