A developer complained to the senior developer: “Every sprint, we fix bugs that create new bugs. Every feature spawns three more features. Every solution becomes tomorrow’s problem. When does it end?”
The senior developer nodded. “Show me your deployment history.”
Together they scrolled through months of releases: hotfixes begetting patches, patches requiring rollbacks, rollbacks necessitating rewrites, rewrites introducing regressions.
“I see the pattern now,” said the developer. “We’re trapped in an endless cycle.”
“Trapped?” asked the senior developer. “Look closer. Who is writing this code?”
The developer examined the git blame. Every line pointed back to the team—including themselves.
“We are creating our own suffering,” the developer realized.
The senior developer smiled. “And if you create it, what else might you create?”
The next sprint, the developer paused before each commit, asking: “Am I perpetuating the cycle, or am I finding a way off the wheel?”
This koan reflects Samsara—the Buddhist concept of the endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth driven by karma and ignorance. In software development, we often create our own cycles of technical debt, quick fixes, and reactive programming that trap us in patterns of suffering until we develop the awareness to break free.