A developer opened a pull request and waited.
Three days passed. The senior developer found them at their desk, refreshing the page.
“What are you waiting for?” the senior asked.
“For someone to review my work.”
“And while you wait, what is your work doing?”
The developer paused. “Nothing.”
The senior nodded. “Then what was the hurry?”
Sitting with the Koan
There is a particular kind of suffering in the act of waiting for a code review. The work is done — or feels done — and yet it is not done. It sits in a queue, unread, neither merged nor rejected, occupying a strange in-between state that the development process has no good name for.
The developer in this koan has submitted their pull request with urgency. Three days ago, something felt important enough to rush. But now, at the desk, refreshing the page at intervals, the urgency has nowhere to go. The code sits still. The developer does not.
“And while you wait, what is your work doing?” This is the question that cuts through. Not why haven’t they reviewed it yet, not is my code good enough — but a simpler, more unsettling observation: the work is not doing anything. It is waiting, just as the developer is waiting. Both are still. Only one of them knows it.
The senior’s final question — “Then what was the hurry?” — is not sarcasm. It is a genuine inquiry. If the code reaches the same resting state regardless of the speed at which it was written, what was the velocity for? What was being served by the urgency that preceded the stillness?