“The review isn't checking the diff — it's checking me.” Research on code review anxiety found two rigged dials: probability bias (“I'll definitely get torn apart”) and cost bias (“and it will prove what I am”). Nearly half of developers run this script at clinical intensity, and it drives the exact behaviors that stall careers: stalling PRs, rubber-stamping, avoiding review entirely.
WIPE_SCRIPTS
The Science of Imposter Phenomenon in Software Engineering: Why It's Not Just Self-Doubt
21 scripts this research explains — 'Everyone here is smarter than me and it's only a matter of time before they notice.' That thought — or something close
“The org chart is a correctness proof — whoever outranks me is right, and my read of the room is my rank.” Google's Project Aristotle tested that theory on 180 of its own teams: composition and seniority predicted almost nothing; whether people felt safe to challenge and disagree predicted nearly everything. The hierarchy in your head is stricter than the one in the company.
The Seniority Oracle
“A real engineer already knows, so every question is a confession and every 'I don't know' is a resignation letter.” This is the ask-vs-should-know bind, and it's why 52.7% of surveyed software engineers report frequent-to-intense impostor feelings while sitting on teams full of people quietly Googling the same things. The script converts the cheapest operation in engineering — asking — into the most expensive one.
The Solo Compile
"If the AI can write this, my skills are worthless." Frontiers Psychology 2026 research on "algorithmic anxiety" found that 46% of all code is now generated by AI, driving profound identity disruption among knowledge workers. The script isn't about losing your job tomorrow — it's the slower burn: watching code you'd spend an hour crafting be generated in 20 seconds, then asking whether the years you spent learning architecture, debugging, and pattern-matching ever mattered at all. It collapses skill-building into typing-vs-prompting and misses the whole channel: judgment, context, tradeoff reasoning, and knowing which 20-second output to reject.
The AI Obsolescence Script
- If the AI can do it, I don't need to know it
- My entire career is one prompt away from irrelevance
- Reaching for the AI proves I never learned it
- An hour of my work, generated in seconds
- I spent a decade learning what just got automated
- Junior devs with AI will leapfrog me
- Using the AI feels like cheating
- The AI solution exposes how basic my approach was
- I wasted years not learning this sooner
- Every system I built could have been a prompt