Sisyphus, cursed by the gods to forever push an immense boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down when nearing the top, has been given a new task. The gods have become bored watching him perform the same struggle, day in and day out. In a way, they're the real victims of this punishment. To free themselves from this torture, the gods have decided to change his punishment for the modern age. Sisyphus must now update NPM dependencies for a large, enterprise scale Node application.
Sisyphus must update the project to use NPM packages which have no known vulnerabilities, and make any necessary code changes if the public interface has changed for any code called by the application. And of course, he must ensure application functionality does not change. Functional changes are made in a different PR, by a different developer on the team.
By the time he fully updates the project and runs 'npm audit', he learns the package versions he's using have known vulnerabilities and must start the work all over again.
"This would be way easier if I didn't keep running out of tokens the first hour of the day," says Sisyphus.
"It's even better than the boulder because it's all self-contained. And this time around, we don't even have to enchant anything. It's just how things work in the mortal realm," Zeus declared, before yelling 'Pull!' and throwing a lightning bolt at a bird.
When asked how this compares to pushing a boulder, Sisyphus told us, "Eh."