Circle Three

They fed the code with layers deep, Beyond what reason dared to keep. Where elegance might stand upright, They piled on weight and called it might.

First Scene: The Sludge #

Leaving the storm behind, we entered a circle of cold, unending, and putrid rain. A vile slush of half-frozen sludge lay thick upon the ground, and the souls of the damned were forced to lie within it, exposed to the foul downpour. An unceasing, hungry barking echoed through the gloom.

As my eyes adjusted, I saw the source: Cerberus, the great three-headed hound of this realm. But his heads were not of a beast. One was a monstrous CPU, red-lining with usage. The second, a gaping maw of RAM, consuming all in its path. The third, a disk drive, thrashing wildly with I/O operations. With his claws, he ripped and flayed the spirits wallowing in the muck.

"Behold the gluttons," the Sage said, his voice dripping with disgust. "In life, they consumed resources without thought or measure. Theirs is the sin of Premature Optimization, Code Bloat, and the creation of the dreaded God Object."

I saw developers half-submerged in a mire of their own making: tangled messes of verbose code, XML configurations that ran for thousands of lines, and classes that tried to do everything and thus did nothing well. They had built systems that devoured memory and CPU cycles for the simplest of tasks, creating applications so bloated they brought servers to their knees.

"Their indulgence in needless complexity and excessive abstraction has earned them this mire,"

the Sage explained. "They lie in the cold slush of inefficiency they created, tormented by the very performance bottlenecks they introduced. Cerberus, the embodiment of their system’s strained resources, eternally torments them for their gluttony. They who over-consumed are now themselves consumed."

Second Scene: The Banquet Table #

At the edge of the mire stood a great banquet table, stretching endlessly into the darkness. It was heaped with offerings: third-party plugins, optimization flags, and code snippets harvested from forums long forgotten.

Souls crowded around, greedily devouring each morsel, stuffing functions with flags, chaining decorators, wrapping wrappers around wrappers. Each line of code added more to the grotesque feast.

But as soon as they consumed, their dishes filled again—more libraries, more features, more "enhancements." And with each new bite, their systems grew slower, heavier, until the banquet collapsed beneath its own weight, only to rebuild itself again in an endless cycle.

"These are the Hoarders of Functionality," the Sage said. "They never saw a plugin they could refuse, never questioned the value of more. And now, they dine forever, starving for simplicity yet stuffed with complication."