During a sprint retrospective yesterday at 10 AM, developer Lester Kruge showed off the proof of concept for a new API feature since it was functional enough to demonstrate to the group. While scrolling through the code, he made the short comment, "It's ugly right now, but so is all my code. It'll get cleaned up later." Kruge was not prepared for the entire room to agree, loudly, and consistently.
Comments like, "It'll never be clean," "It's physically impossible to improve that, just start over," and "How dare you call yourself a developer," were fired from the audience in rapid succession. He ran out of the room with a single tear running down his face, yelling, "If I wanted to be insulted like that, I would use Stack Overflow again."
The comments got worse over time. He received Slack messages that afternoon like, "I hope they fire you", and "I hate you so much, I'm glad you missed your aunt's funeral last week to fix a production outage. Oh, sorry Lester. Wrong person." Kruge attempted to file a complaint with HR, but was told all forms of code criticism is allowed, as outlined in his contract.
When asked what he really thought of his code, Kruge replied, "I'm sure this is controversial, but I think it's at least as good as what Claude outputs."