Symphony for the Broken Future
Coding in the Age of Cyberpunk Dreams and Post-Apocalyptic Nightmares
By Nigel Dsouza
There’s a moment in Cyberpunk 2077, after a brutal mission, where all you can do is stand on a balcony and watch neon spill across a broken city.
The soundtrack swells — ambient, haunting, almost like Hans Zimmer scored your failure.
It’s beautiful.
And deeply sad.
Because the future, once imagined as gleaming chrome, is now rusty, glitching, and full of regret.
And that’s exactly how I feel sometimes staring at production logs at 2 a.m.
🧠 We Are Living in Our Own Sci-Fi
We’ve become the cyberpunks.
- Patching legacy systems with shell scripts and caffeine
- Watching AI models we don’t fully understand make decisions we can’t predict
- Writing Terraform like it’s a spellbook
We build systems meant to last forever in a world that’s breaking faster than we can debug it.
We automate until we forget how it works.
We deploy until we forget why we started.
☢️ The Fallout of Scale
In Fallout 4, the world ends because we pursued endless energy without questioning the cost.
It’s fiction — but it’s not far off.
We scale systems without thinking about their failure modes.
We chase serverless, stateless, trustless — until everything’s weightless.
Then one day, the pipeline breaks — and there’s no one left who knows how it works.
Our cloud architecture is becoming the vaults: sealed, automated, and eventually abandoned.
🎻 Hans Zimmer Would Understand
If infrastructure had a soundtrack, it wouldn’t be cheerful.
It would be Zimmer’s deep, vibrating strings.
Minor keys. Swells and silences.
The sound of tension, awe, and fragility.
That’s what it feels like building global-scale systems under deadline pressure with a looming incident budget.
It’s a slow symphony of barely-contained entropy.
🎼 You Are the Composer
When you architect a system, you write more than code —
you write a score.
- Each module is a motif
- Each service call, a harmony
- Every deployment, a crescendo
And if you don’t leave behind documentation, patterns, and intent?
Your successors will hear only static.
🎮 Toward a More Playable Future
Maybe the answer isn’t more automation.
Maybe it’s making systems more playable.
Like games, our infrastructure should be:
- Explorable – self-documenting, observable, safe to break
- Narrative – with commit logs and comments that tell a story
- Tunable – like difficulty sliders for performance, cost, latency
- Immersive – with dashboards and tooling that feel like control panels, not punishment
What if engineers looked forward to deploying like gamers do to boss fights?
What if reading a codebase felt like discovering lore?
What if Zimmer composed our alerts?
🎬 The Code We Deserve
The future isn’t chrome or rust.
It’s both.
And in that tension — between innovation and decay, between ambition and burnout — is where we write the next movement.
You’re not just coding.
You’re composing the soundtrack to a civilization.
So make it sing.
👤 About the Author
Nigel Dsouza is a Principal Software Engineer, gamer, and composer of cloud-native systems at Fidelity Investments.
He codes like it’s a cyberpunk noir and documents like someone might need to survive in his architecture.
His favorite key is minor.
Top comments (21)
Really sharp piece, Nigel. The “symphony of entropy” metaphor hits hard — especially in the context of systems where the original design intent fades and all that’s left is behaviour without explanation. Your point about systems needing to be explorable and playable resonates a lot. Too often we optimise for performance and reliability, but not for maintainability or human legibility. This kind of thinking is essential if we want to build infra that lasts beyond its first generation of owners. Thanks for framing it so clearly.
The pipeline breaks and there's no one left to fix it......Lack of documentation....I've heard the static more times than I would like to remember!!
But Nigel, I take heart from your stating the problem boldly and also scoring the solution...
Lovely reading your post Nigel! Everything in the universe changes ... why not tune into change with a little melody that's reflected in the actions we take (and of course the code we write)? Nice way to think about architecture and code ... perhaps used to be the way in the days of the "art of programming" (remember D. Knuth?) of yore ... now lost in the speed of change. Feels like the part about "Playable Future" might be a good prompt for AI as it generates code?
In today’s fast-paced world, we’re increasingly turning to automation—performing tasks with mechanical efficiency but often without heart, soul, or mindful engagement. As we continue to innovate and streamline our daily routines, we risk losing our originality. Our efforts start to drift, delivering short-lived, surface-level results that stray far from the original intent.
We gradually become more robotic—productive, yet disconnected.
As a long-term remedy, Nigel offers a compelling perspective: to truly transform how we work, we must approach each task with intention and creativity. Systems should be playable—designed to be explorable, narrative-driven, tunable, and immersive. Only then can we reclaim purpose, connection, and ingenuity in what we do.
Nigel, your interdisciplinary expertise is reflected in the creative metaphors you use in your writings, showcasing your unique perspective. You possess a remarkable ability to identify challenges and devise innovative solutions, demonstrating strong strategic thinking. Your company is truly lucky to have such a resourceful and insightful individual on the team.
Very profound and philosophical Nigel!
" We build systems meant to last forever in a world that’s breaking faster than we can debug it." I can see your software engineering soul pour out its grief in this statement.
I'm sure most software engineers can empathize with you
Helpful insight!
Interesting POV. You are making a strong case that good coding or systems may be more art than science! Much food for thought - and a bit to worry about as well!!
Thoughtful insight 👍
Love the comparisons with other games and painting the picture. Helps us understand your pov better. It's a great read!