Circle Seven

They struck the roots they swore to keep, And left the fertile fields to sleep. In haste, in pride, they razed with glee - Then named their wrecks "velocity."

First Scene: The Rings of Violence #

The landscape beyond the city of Confusion was one of horror, divided into three rings, each punishing a different form of Violence.

The First Ring: Violence Against Others #

We came to a river of boiling blood and fire. In it were submerged those who had willfully harmed their colleagues and other systems.

These were the authors of Breaking API Changes and Leaky Abstractions - developers who introduced pain with no regard for those downstream. They had flooded their projects with cascading failures and left no bridge unburned.

As they had made others suffer through their carelessness, so now they boil for eternity.

Along the banks marched centaurs - vigilant, tireless, part-human and part-process. They loosed arrows marked Critical Priority at any soul who dared rise above the level of pain they once inflicted.

The Second Ring: Violence Against Self #

Next, we entered a strange and sorrowful wood. There were no green leaves, only gnarled, black, and thorny trees.

These were the souls of developers who had committed violence against their own codebase. This was the forest of Copy-and-Paste Programming, and those who Willfully Deleted Unit Tests.

By duplicating code instead of abstracting it, they inflicted a thousand tiny wounds upon the project. By removing its defenses, they left it open to ruin.

Their punishment is to be rooted as brittle trees, unable to move, their branches (their duplicated code) snapped and broken by harpies - bugs from the future - causing them endless pain. They can only speak by bleeding.

The Third Ring: Violence Against the Craft #

Beyond the wood lay a desert of burning sand, upon which fell a ceaseless rain of fire.

Here were punished those who showed contempt for the system’s natural order - its architecture.

These are the creators of the Big Ball of Mud. They ignored design, principle, and separation. They connected everything to everything else until no form remained.

Their punishment is to wander aimlessly in a barren architectural wasteland they themselves created, scorched by the fiery rain of production failures and unfixable bugs.

"This is the cost of disregard", the Sage murmured.

"When architecture is sacrificed for speed, entropy becomes your only legacy."

Second Scene: The Inner Sanctum of Misguided Leaders #

At the center of the burning plain stood a massive black ziggurat, a temple of brittle abstraction and empty metrics.

Here, surrounded by dashboards that glowed with false green, sat the souls of former architects and CTOs - those who led entire companies into ruin, armed with only conviction and ignorance.

They sat on thrones of YAML and Post-it Notes, scrolling endless backlogs of abandoned tickets, blind to the disasters they once presided over.

"These were the visionaries", said the Sage, "who saw only graphs and investor decks. They made decisions with no understanding of code, no ear for the voice of the system. Their punishment is to rule over a kingdom of fire and silence - where every metric is perfect, and every user has left."

In the air above, a single, massive deployment pipeline loops forever - hanging, incomplete, failing at 99.9% as their frozen expressions watch it restart again.