Cutting Into the Artery

May 7. Morning.

The blog post was finished. Fifteen hundred words, revised three times.

Title: An Unemployed Programmer and His BugKiller

Gu Siyue took eleven minutes to review it. She sent back three messages.

First: "Fine."

Second: "Four don'ts: don't mention Dingsheng; call them your 'former employer.' Don't mention any names. Don't attack anyone proactively. Tell your own story—don't hand them anything to use against you."

Third: "Let me see the final version before you post it."

Su Niannian changed one thing after reading it. She changed "unemployed" to "optimized out."

"Sounds better. And it's a meme—every office drone gets it."

"What sounds good about being optimized out?"

"Believe it or not, once that title goes up, the top comment will be, 'What do the people who optimized him out think now?'"

The entire piece never mentioned Dingsheng. It never named anyone. It only covered four things: getting laid off, taking freelance jobs, recognizing bug patterns, and creating BugKiller.

"This February, my former employer optimized me out. Five years on the job, P7, B+ annual rating. The day the layoff notice came, I signed the papers and walked out of the building.

"For the next two months, I did three things every day: took freelance development jobs to pay rent, wrote code for all kinds of projects, and stared at bugs in a daze.

"Every bug looks different, but there are only so many ways to make mistakes. The same logical traps keep appearing in different projects, just wearing different clothes. I recorded those patterns and fed them to a model.

"That was BugKiller. A bug detection tool built by a programmer who'd been optimized out."

The final paragraph—

"I wasn't trying to prove anything. But after spending so many years in this industry, I had to leave behind something useful."

Gu Siyue's feedback was brief: "The wording is fine. No aggressive narrative. 'Optimized out' was a good change. Whose idea was that?"

"A friend's."

She paused for two seconds. "Sharp mind."

He posted it.

Then it exploded.

One hour. More than five hundred replies.

Two hours. More than three thousand likes. The post rose from the tech section to the forum homepage.

"NullPointer got laid off???"

"Wait... he made BugKiller by himself? Alone? No team?"

"A P7 got laid off and made a product this good? What kind of eyes did his former employer have?"

"'Had to leave behind something useful.' I sat at my desk in silence for five minutes after reading that."

"I lay in bed at home for three months after getting laid off. This guy got laid off and made a product that crushed a Stanford PhD team's work. The gap between people is insane."

"Best resignation story of the year. No contest."

Su Niannian had been right. There really was a highly upvoted comment—

"What do the people who optimized him out think now???"

More than four thousand likes.

The top-liked comment read—

"This isn't optimization. This is cutting straight into the artery with a layoff."

More than eight thousand likes. Below it came an entire chain of people echoing "the artery." Someone even generated an image of a scalpel cutting into an artery, labeled "HR department of a certain tech giant." The blog hadn't named the company, but the comments had a tacit understanding. "A certain tech giant that wishes to remain anonymous" and "Some Ding-something Sheng-something" flooded the screen.

Five in the afternoon. Ma Xiaofei arrived at 502.

Two light stands, a Sony A7M4, and a wireless lavalier mic. In three minutes, he set up a simple filming area in front of Han Luyi's desk, more skillfully than he wrote code.

"Sit there. Act natural."

"What counts as natural?"

"Be how you are when you write code. Don't look at the camera. Look at me."

Han Luyi sat down. Behind him was his monitor, and beside it was the ladybug drawing Duoduo had made. Ma Xiaofei glanced at the picture, adjusted the camera angle, and framed the ladybug in the lower-right corner.

"What's that?"

"A neighbor kid drew it."

Ma Xiaofei opened the interview outline on his tablet—the third version, rewritten after Han Luyi had rejected the first two for being "too melodramatic."

"Okay. Let's do a run-through first. If it doesn't work, we'll do it again."

For the first three minutes after the record button was pressed, Han Luyi sounded like he was giving a technical presentation. He talked about BugKiller's architecture, the principles of pattern matching, and how they had reduced the false positive rate from 8% to 3.8%. Ma Xiaofei listened for a while, then reached into the shot and blocked the camera.

"Stop."

"What?"

"You're talking about code. The audience doesn't care how BugKiller works. They care why you made it."

Han Luyi thought for a moment. "Because bugs have patterns."

"No. One level higher."

"Because I got laid off."

"Higher."

"Because something I spent years writing could be made worthless after someone changed a few lines."

Ma Xiaofei gave him a thumbs-up and hit record again.

This take went smoothly. Han Luyi spoke more and more naturally. By the end, he was no longer looking at Ma Xiaofei. He stared at his own monitor as he talked, like he was reviewing everything with another version of himself.

When he mentioned getting an extra fifty thousand yuan on the day he was laid off, Ma Xiaofei couldn't help blurting, "Holy shit." When Han Luyi said, "All bugs look the same," Ma Xiaofei stopped and listened seriously for more than ten seconds.

They filmed for forty minutes. As Ma Xiaofei packed up the camera, he casually took a close-up of Han Luyi's profile. BugKiller's backend data dashboard filled the monitor, the ladybug picture sat beside it, and outside the window was the skyline of the old neighborhood.

"I'm using this shot for the cover."

"Whatever."

"Not whatever. This shot is worth a hundred thousand views."

While packing up the light stands, Ma Xiaofei asked, "I've got the title: <A Tech Giant Laid Off a Million-Yuan-a-Year Programmer. Three Months Later, He Made a Product That Rubbed His Former Employer's Face Into the Ground>."

Han Luyi said, "No."

"...What's wrong with it?"

"'Rubbed his former employer's face into the ground.'"

Ma Xiaofei said, "It's not like I said it. The bullet comments said it. I was just... predicting the bullet comments in advance."

Han Luyi said, "Predict my ass. Change it."

The final compromise was: <A Tech Giant Laid Off a Million-Yuan-a-Year Programmer. He Built a Product Alone That Shook the Internet>. Ma Xiaofei insisted on keeping two huge words on the cover: "Slap in the Face."

May 8. Eight in the morning. The video went live.

Ma Xiaofei had edited until four in the morning. The finished video ran nearly twenty minutes, paced in his usual style. The first thirty seconds featured memorable lines from the blog, each word popping up one at a time with typewriter sound effects. The main footage compared data from BugKiller, CodeSafe, and several other established tools, intercut with Ma Xiaofei's own experience using them and interview clips with Han Luyi.

"I won't make any judgments. The data is on the screen; you can see for yourselves. But let me say this: I've been a tech content creator for six years, and this is the first time I've seen a story this absurd. One person. Laid off. Three months. Built a product that crushed every competitor on the first day of public beta."

"If you told me this was a web novel, I'd say it was too far-fetched."

"But it's real."

Twelve hours. Three hundred and twenty thousand views.

Twenty-four hours. Eight hundred and seventy thousand.

Ma Xiaofei posted a screenshot in the 404 Group.

"ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND!!! I'VE GOT OVER A HUNDRED THOUSAND FOLLOWERS!!!! Who dares challenge the king of the tech category!!!"

Zhang Haoran: "Calm down. Your follower growth is from riding Han Luyi's hype."

Ma Xiaofei: "...Shut up."

The numbers on BugKiller's backend took off along with the video. Registered users rose from 612 on the first day of public beta to 1,400. In two days, they had more than doubled.

Su Niannian sent a message: "Do you know what people are discussing most on the forums now? Not whether BugKiller is useful—it's you. Users remember stories ten times faster than they remember features."

Han Luyi replied with an "Mm."

He put down his phone and continued writing the hotfix for v1.1.

That same day. Nine at night.

Pudong, in a private club's private room.

Zhao Wenyuan sat by the window, not touching the pu'er tea in front of him.

He had spent the whole day scrolling through "cutting straight into the artery with a layoff." He read NullPointer's blog twice, word by word, and watched Ma Xiaofei's video in full. One highly rated comment had over three thousand likes: "Dr. Zhao wrote three thousand words to set the rules, while NullPointer just threw out the data. Two weeks have passed. Who do you think won?"

He turned off his phone.

Someone sat across from him. In his early fifties, gray suit, platinum cufflinks. His posture was perfectly upright; even sitting there, he looked like he was in a meeting.

"Dr. Zhao." The man across from him spoke first, his voice steady. "Do you know the LP structure behind the lead investor in your angel round?"

Zhao Wenyuan looked at him. "Dingsheng has cross-shareholdings. That isn't a secret."

"The cross-shareholdings are only what's on the surface." Wang Zhiyuan's tone did not change. "There's some of my personal money in it too."

Zhao Wenyuan showed no expression. When he took the angel investment, he had only met with the fund's GP. The other party had said there was backing from industrial capital, but had never specified who.

The first money in his pocket had been put there by the man sitting before him.

"President Wang didn't invite me here today just to acknowledge kinship, did you?"

The corners of Wang Zhiyuan's mouth moved. It was not quite a smile.

"NullPointer's real name is Han Luyi. I optimized him out. P7. Last year, he worked on recommendation algorithms at Dingsheng and improved conversion rates by 37%. Ninety percent of the code was written by him alone."

Zhao Wenyuan's finger paused against the rim of his cup.

"Why do you think a mere P7 could make something like this in three months?"

Zhao Wenyuan said nothing. He had asked himself that question many times.

"I can't figure it out either. But whether we understand it isn't important. What matters is whether you can beat him."

Wang Zhiyuan picked up his teacup and took a sip.

"There's a ceiling to building a product alone. Right now, he's a story, not a company. Stories lose heat."

Zhao Wenyuan stared at him. "What are you trying to say, President Wang?"

"Dingsheng is preparing to move into code review. I'll push the group to provide resources." Wang Zhiyuan set down his cup. "But I don't want to start from zero."

Zhao Wenyuan understood.

The angel round had been funded with Wang Zhiyuan's personal money. Dingsheng Cloud was the group's resource. What he wanted to do was simple: use the company's channels to feed the project he had personally invested in. Whether Han Luyi was truly a threat did not matter. What mattered was that the "BugKiller threat theory" could help him get approval within the group.

"How exactly would we cooperate?"

"CodeSafe joins Dingsheng Cloud's developer toolchain. One hundred and fifty thousand enterprise clients—the moment they push their code, it goes through your review engine."

It sounded like a windfall from heaven.

But Zhao Wenyuan had taken venture capital before. He was no longer a student. Once the channel to those 150,000 clients was connected, CodeSafe's growth would be tied to Dingsheng Cloud. Today it was called cooperation. Tomorrow, dependency. The day after, acquisition. He had seen too many startups die on this road—fed fat by a tech giant's resources, then swallowed by those same resources.

He looked at Wang Zhiyuan. This man had invested in his angel round and now wanted to stuff Dingsheng's resources into his hands. What was coming in was not money. It was a rope.

But he calculated another account as well. How much money would it take, and how long would it take, for his own team of fifteen to beat Han Luyi?

Pudong's nightscape outside the window was bright.

"Let me think about it."

Wang Zhiyuan stood and adjusted his cufflinks.

"No rush. But remember, opportunities don't come twice."