Who says you can’t be praised (and get paid to boot) for fibbing about work at the office? Recently, a techie became a minor Internet sensation when he took to social media and revealed he had been shirking off responsibilities and getting away with it. The post, which was shared on the subreddit Developers India, has gone viral.
The individual openly admitted that he had been consistently offering fabricated updates during daily meetings, masking the fact that he hadn’t even started on the assignment he was supposed to complete. The reason behind his actions? He was mentally drained, overwhelmed, and caught in a loop of quiet disengagement. With no motivation to code, he chose to delay the work until the very last possible moment.
However, his luck began to run out when his team lead began to grow suspicious. During one of the stand-up meetings, the manager raised a few simple questions about his progress. The techie struggled to respond convincingly, revealing his lack of real engagement. This triggered a demand from the management—a demonstration of the work he had claimed to be working on, due the very next day.
What complicated matters further was the fact that he had only recently joined the company. As a newcomer, he had no understanding of the tools, programming language, or even the nature of the product. With the clock ticking, panic started to set in.
Desperate for a solution, he turned to Cursor, an AI coding assistant, to quickly catch him up to speed. Still feeling too unmotivated to tackle the task the night before, he made the bold choice to wake up at 4 a.m. on the day of the scheduled demo and try to finish four weeks of work within just six hours.
Thanks to some extremely precise instructions fed into the AI tool, he was able to generate around 4000 lines of functional code within that brief window. Miraculously, the demo went smoothly, and the manager appeared impressed with what was presented. Despite a month of doing nothing and avoiding responsibility, the coder managed to turn the situation around at the last moment—largely due to the capabilities of artificial intelligence.
While the story has amused and impressed many online, it also raises uncomfortable questions about burnout, dependency on AI, and the current state of remote work culture. Yet, in this case, a combination of luck, last-minute hustle, and machine assistance allowed someone to walk away not just unnoticed—but applauded.