This lazy programmer’s lifehacks are going viral because humanity is doomed

It takes far too much effort to make coffee, email your wife, and do most parts of your job, according to a programmer whose lifehacks posted to GitHub went viral after being reported by Business Insider this week.

Yes, all three tasks clearly take effort (albeit to varying degrees) and have perhaps been made obsolete by some clever lines of code, but really, I feel the bigger story here is humanity’s impending doom.

OK, I’m joking.

The robots are going to take over soon anyway, so why not get on the bandwagon? And while humanity probably won’t experience a Matrix-style apocalypse as robots start getting smarter and replacing us in our jobs (we can always scorch the skies if it goes horribly wrong, right? — Oh no, wait, that didn’t work), stories like this serve as a reminder that laziness is not always a bad thing — assuming it can be channeled creatively.

It was the desire for a faster and more reliable cab that birthed Uber, now worth over $51 billion. And American entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuck recently told an audience of students to build a startup that saves people time, because that’s one of the biggest things that consumers today will pay a premium for.

And he’s right.

The real reason stories like this one of the “lazy” programmer go viral is because, yes, we find it hilarious, but also because we get excited at the idea that someone can use technology to hack their life so efficiently and thus enjoy more freedom (and free time).

Isn’t that what almost every startup out there aims to do? Good startups are really just churning out lifehacks like this programmer does, but on a much bigger scale. That’s why they’re valuable, and that’s why this story resonates with people. I guarantee you that a lot of people reading it wished for a moment that they could do the exact same thing.

“If something — anything — requires more than 90 seconds of his time, he writes a script to automate that,” the programmer, Nihad Abbasov, was quoted as saying in reference to a former colleague from whom he got the script.

Business Insider concludes:

And the best one? He wrote a script that waits exactly 17 seconds, then hacks into the coffee machine and orders it to start brewing a latte. The script tells the machine to wait another 24 seconds before pouring the latte into a cup, the exact time it takes it takes to walk from the guy’s desk to the coffee machine. And his coworkers didn’t even know the coffee machine was on the network and was hack-able.

The moral of the story? We don’t need Neo-like powers to be thrilled. It’s still the little things that get us excited. Startups — and lazy programmers — still have a lot of opportunity to hack our lives for the better. Even if that’s just shaving a few seconds off the amount of time it takes to make a cup of coffee.

Because people love that sh#t.