Developers are brilliant.
Developers are creative.
Developers ship entire worlds made of code.
But they also possess a supernatural gift:
the ability to generate excuses so absurd, so chaotic, so galaxy-brained… that they practically compile on their own.
Today we dive into the mind of a developer cornered by bugs, deadlines, PMs, and the occasional “Why is production down?” message.
Buckle up — these dev excuses deserve their own GitHub repo.
1. “It Works on My Machine.”
The national anthem of developers.
The battle cry of broken builds.
The ultimate shield against responsibility.
If your app crashes everywhere except one laptop from 2017 with 23 background scripts running — that’s not the dev’s problem.
That’s a you problem.
2. “It’s Not a Bug, It’s a Feature.”
Translation:
“I didn’t mean to do this, but now I will defend it with my life.”
Unexpected behavior?
Business logic that no one approved?
A button that deletes the entire database?
Feature.
Canon.
Intentional by design.
3. “The API Is Lying.”
When everything points to a dev mistake, there’s always one final card to play:
“The API is wrong.”
As if the API woke up and chose violence.
As if the JSON payload personally wanted to ruin your sprint planning.
4. “The Codebase Is Haunted.”
Some developers blame legacy code.
Others blame architecture.
But the elite developers — the true seniors —
blame ghosts.
Phantom imports.
Random segfaults.
Variables that change by themselves.
Call a priest.
Restart the server.
Same thing.
5. “It Was the Merge. The Merge Did It.”
Merges are the Bermuda Triangle of software development.
Things go in — clean, logical, documented —
and come out looking like spaghetti cooked by an angry toddler.
If a dev says:
“I swear it worked before the merge,”
don’t question it.
Just nod.
And pray.
6. “The Linter Is Wrong.”
Ah yes, the ancient developer tradition of arguing with a machine whose only job is to help.
“The linter doesn’t understand my style.”
“This is artistic indentation.”
“It compiles, doesn’t it?”
Technically true.
Professionally concerning.
7. “I Didn’t Touch That Part of the Code.”
But somehow everything broke exactly where they didn’t touch.
Mysterious.
Cosmic.
Almost poetic.
Even better when Git shows their fingerprints all over the file.
8. “It Must Be a Browser Issue.”
Classic front-end counterattack.
If Chrome breaks it → Safari is the real problem.
If Safari breaks it → Firefox is outdated.
If Firefox breaks it → “Why are you still using Firefox?”
Untouchable logic.
9. “I’ll Fix It in the Next Sprint.”
Also known as:
“I will throw this bug into a black hole and hope no one remembers.”
Spoiler:
Everyone remembers.
10. “It’s Caching.”
The Swiss Army excuse.
Works for everything.
Slow UI? Caching.
Wrong data? Caching.
App won’t load? Caching.
You feel existential dread? Caching.
No one truly understands caching.
Not even caching understands caching.
11. “The Test Environment Is Cursed.”
Tests pass locally.
Fail in CI.
Pass again in staging.
Fail randomly at 3 AM.
Conclusion:
The test environment is possessed.
Possibly by whoever wrote the tests.
12. “It’s a Race Condition… I Think.”
A powerful excuse.
Even PMs won’t challenge it.
The best part?
Most developers secretly hope no one asks follow-up questions because even they don’t fully understand what’s happening.
13. “The AI Generated That Part.”
Welcome to modern dev life.
AI wrote the bug.
AI introduced chaos.
AI also refused to explain itself.
Perfect scapegoat.
10/10 excuse.
Cannot be disproven.
Final Thought
Developers don’t just write code.
They write legendary excuses — some so creative they should be copyrighted.
But deep down, these excuses share one truth:
If devs say it wasn’t their fault… it definitely was.
But we love them anyway.