Cutting into the Main Artery

May 7, morning.

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

Title: An Unemployed Programmer and His BugKiller

Gu Siyue spent eleven minutes reviewing it and sent back three messages.

First: "Looks good."

Second: "Four don'ts: don't mention Dingsheng, call them your 'former employer.' Don't mention anyone by name. Don't attack first. 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 made one change after reading it. She changed "unemployed" to "optimized."

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

"What's good about the words 'optimized'?"

"Believe it or not, once that title goes up, the top comment will be, 'What are the people who optimized him thinking 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.

"In February this year, my former employer optimized me. Five years on the job, P7, B+ annual review. On 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. I took freelance development jobs to pay rent, wrote code for all kinds of projects, and stared at Bugs.

"All Bugs looked different, but there were only so many ways to make mistakes. The same logic traps kept appearing across different projects, just wearing different clothes. I recorded those patterns and fed them to a model.

"That was BugKiller, a Bug detection tool made by an optimized programmer."

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. Changing it to 'optimized' was a good call. Whose idea was that?"

"A friend's."

After two seconds, she replied, "Sharp mind."

He posted it.

Then it exploded.

One hour. More than five hundred replies.

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

"NullPointer got laid off???"

"Wait... he made BugKiller alone? By himself? No team?"

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

"'I had to leave behind something useful.' After reading that, I sat silently at my desk for five minutes."

"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. The gap between people is brutal."

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

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

"What are the people who optimized him thinking now???"

More than four thousand likes.

The top-liked comment read—

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

More than eight thousand likes. Below it came an entire chain of people repeating "main artery." Someone even generated an image of a scalpel cutting into an artery, labeled "HR Department of Some Major Tech Company." The blog never named the company, but the comments had an unspoken understanding. "A major tech company that wishes to remain unnamed" and "Some Ding-something Sheng-something" flooded the page.

At five in the afternoon, Ma Xiaofei arrived at 502.

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

"Sit there. Act natural."

"How am I supposed to act natural?"

"Just 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 drawing, adjusted the 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 draft rewritten after Han Luyi had rejected the first two for being "too melodramatic."

"Alright. We'll 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 explained BugKiller's architecture, the principles behind pattern matching, and the process of bringing the false-positive rate down from 8% to 3.8%. Ma Xiaofei listened for a while, then reached in front of the lens and blocked it.

"Stop."

"What's wrong?"

"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. Go 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 pressed 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 spoke, as if reviewing everything with another version of himself.

When he mentioned receiving an extra fifty thousand yuan on the day he was laid off, Ma Xiaofei couldn't help saying, "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. While packing up the camera, Ma Xiaofei casually took a close-up of Han Luyi's profile. BugKiller's backend data dashboard was displayed on the monitor, the ladybug drawing was beside it, and the skyline of the old neighborhood stretched beyond the window.

"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 figured out. <A Major Tech Company Laid Off a Million-Yuan-Annual-Salary Programmer, and Three Months Later He Made a Product That Ground His Former Employer into the Dirt>."

Han Luyi said, "No."

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

"'Ground into the dirt.'"

Ma Xiaofei said, "It's not my wording. 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 Major Tech Company Laid Off a Million-Yuan-Annual-Salary Programmer, and He Made a Product That Shocked the Entire Internet All by Himself>. 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 opening thirty seconds featured memorable lines from the blog, each word popping out one by one with typewriter sound effects. The core footage compared data from BugKiller, CodeSafe, and several other established tools, intercut with Ma Xiaofei's own user experience and clips from Han Luyi's interview.

"I'm not making any judgments. The data is all on the screen, so you can decide for yourselves. But I'll say this: after six years as a tech content creator, this is the first time I've seen a story this ridiculous. One person. Laid off. Three months. He made a product that crushed every competitor on the first day of public beta."

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

"But it's real."

Twelve hours. Three hundred twenty thousand views.

Twenty-four hours. Eight hundred seventy thousand.

Ma Xiaofei posted a screenshot in the 404 Group.

"One hundred thousand!!! I broke one hundred thousand followers!!!! Who dares challenge the king of the tech category!!!"

Zhang Haoran said, "Calm down. Your follower growth came from riding Han Luyi's hype."

Ma Xiaofei said, "...Shut up."

The numbers in BugKiller's backend soared alongside the video. Registered users rose from 612 on the first day of public beta to 1,400. In two days since launch, it had more than doubled.

Su Niannian sent a message: "Do you know what people are discussing most on the forum now? Not whether BugKiller is useful, but you as a person. 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 v1.1 hotfix.

That same day, nine at night.

Pudong, in a private club's private room.

Zhao Wenyuan sat by the window. The pu'er tea before him had not been touched.

He had spent the entire day scrolling through "cutting into the main artery with the layoff." He read NullPointer's blog word for word twice and watched Ma Xiaofei's full video. One highly upvoted comment, with more than three thousand likes, said, "Dr. Zhao used three thousand words to set the rules. 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, as though he were attending 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 visible." Wang Zhiyuan's tone did not change. "Some of the money in there is mine personally."

Zhao Wenyuan showed no expression. When he raised his angel round, he had only met with the fund's GP. They had said there was backing from industry capital, but never specified who.

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

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

The corner 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, raising conversion rates by 37%. Ninety percent of the code was written by him alone."

Zhao Wenyuan's fingers paused on the rim of his cup.

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

Zhao Wenyuan did not answer. 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 lifted his teacup and took a sip.

"There's a ceiling to making products alone. Right now, he's a story, not a company. The heat around a story will pass."

Zhao Wenyuan stared at him. "What is President Wang trying to say?"

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

Zhao Wenyuan understood.

The angel round had been funded with Wang Zhiyuan's personal money. Dingsheng Cloud represented the group's resources. What Wang Zhiyuan wanted to do was simple: use the company's channels to feed the project he had invested in. Whether Han Luyi truly posed a threat was irrelevant. What mattered was that the "BugKiller threat theory" could help him secure approval within the group.

"How exactly would we cooperate?"

"CodeSafe joins Dingsheng Cloud's developer toolchain. One hundred fifty thousand enterprise customers—once their code is pushed through, it goes straight into your review engine."

It sounded like pie falling from the sky.

But Zhao Wenyuan had raised venture capital. He was no longer a student. Once the channels to one hundred fifty thousand customers were connected, CodeSafe's growth would be tied to Dingsheng Cloud. Today it was called cooperation; tomorrow, dependency; the day after that, acquisition. He had seen too many startups die this way, fattened by major tech companies' resources before being swallowed by those same resources.

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

But he also calculated another account. How much would it cost, and how long would it take, for his fifteen-person team to beat Han Luyi on their own?

Outside the window, Pudong's nightscape shone brightly.

"Let me think about it."

Wang Zhiyuan stood and adjusted his cufflinks.

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