Circle Six

In riddled tongues their code was cast, A maze of lies, not meant to last. Their fire burned not with noble flame, But pride, disguised in truth’s own name.

First Scene: City of Confusion #

We crossed the swamp and were met by a great wall, behind which lay a vast cemetery. But instead of graves of earth, there were flaming sepulchres of iron, their lids cast aside. Moans of anguish echoed from within these fiery tombs.

"Welcome to the City of Confusion", he Sage said. "Here, we punish Heresy. The heretics of this domain are those who denied the most fundamental truth of our craft: that code is written for humans first, and machines second."

Peering into a glowing tomb, I saw a soul tormented by flames, desperately trying to trace the logic of a single, monstrous function that snaked around the walls of his prison. This was the punishment for Spaghetti Code.

"These developers believed that if the code compiled, their work was done," said the Sage. "They denied the doctrine of readability, of maintainability, of structure. They created tangled, impenetrable messes that no other soul could hope to comprehend."

In another tomb, a programmer was being burned by a single, massive tool — a Golden Hammer.

"This is the heretic who preaches the dogma of the Golden Hammer," the Sage said. “He who believes one technology, one framework, one pattern is the answer to all problems. He denied the truth of context and chose ideological purity over practical application."

Their punishment is to be sealed forever within the unmaintainable modules they created. As they isolated their code from human understanding, so now are they isolated from all others. And on the Day of Decommission, the lids of their tombs will be sealed forever - their legacy unreadable and lost to time.

Second Scene: The Church of Misalignment #

In the heart of the city stood a broken cathedral carved from the shattered principles of Clean Architecture.

Within it shuffled the souls of those who clung to sacred abstractions, repeating mantras without understanding: "Decouple everything," "Always use interfaces," "All code must be testable."

But they applied these truths blindly, crafting baroque towers of indirection, where factories constructed factories and no value passed unwrapped.

Each soul bore a sacred scroll: the doctrine they once evangelized. But these scrolls now twisted into serpents, biting the very hands that held them.

"These are the dogmatists", the Sage sighed. "They worshipped the rules, not the reasons. And so they are doomed to dwell in brittle temples whose beauty they defend, even as the roof collapses upon them."

A great firestorm circled above, carrying buzzwords that no longer meant anything: "Scalable", "Decentralized", "Modular", burnt into ash by repetition and misuse.

Beneath this storm they wandered, souls once sure of every answer, now praying to broken diagrams in the ruins of forgotten wisdom.