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TechStrip: a developer's life, one strip at a time

TechStrip: a developer's life, one strip at a time
Published on
July 18, 2026
by
Christophe BRAGARD

Welcome to TechStrip, a little comic series about the daily life of an independent developer: code, the AI that apologizes a bit too much, and going solo as a freelancer between France and Cambodia. Nothing serious, mostly self-deprecation.

New strips are added at the top of this page, most recent first.

"The lost dictation"

Six-panel comic, lettered in French. Panel 1: at night, a bearded developer in glasses, facing a monitor split into four terminals labelled PROJET A to D, leans toward his desk microphone and says: "OK. I've got an idea. Listen carefully." Panel 2: standing, one hand raised, inspired: "So basically, we merge the two APIs, we move auth into its own service, and then the front end no longer needs to…" Panel 3: caption "6 minutes later"; he paces with a mug, still talking; all four terminals read "Waiting for instructions". Panel 4: he sits back down, satisfied, and clicks a big STOP button; a banner reads "Transcribing…"; he says: "There. Go." Panel 5: close-up on the empty prompt field, the word VIDE (empty) in red, and a notification: "Transcription failed." Panel 6: close-up on his horrified face, glasses askew, mouth wide open, hands on his cheeks; behind him the terminals are still waiting for instructions.

"A one-million-token Jipiti prompt"

Seven-panel comic. Panel 1: at night, somewhere in the 2000s, a thirty-year-old engineer finishes his workday and closes his laptop, relieved, thinking the best part of the day is still ahead. Panel 2: settled in an armchair, he feeds his few-months-old daughter her bottle and tells her she might become an engineer, a safe job that pays well. Panel 3: above him, a large daydream bubble shows his daughter grown up, a software engineer, alone at a desk covered in monitors, looking isolated; he imagines her set apart, writing to machines in occult languages. Panel 4: a second daydream in the same style runs through a specifications whiteboard, an MVP wireframe sketch, a screen of code, a checklist of tests and a validation checkmark, with the sense of long months of work. Panel 5: some fifteen years later, the father, now forty-five with greying temples, opens the front door to his teenage daughter coming home from school, backpack on, and asks what worthwhile thing she has learned in computing. Panel 6: seen from behind, he listens to his daughter explain, animated, that the teacher gave them a one-million-token Jipiti prompt for a complete SaaS. Panel 7: the father turns toward the reader, incredulous and reluctantly amused, as his daughter goes on: the exercise was to bring that prompt down to five hundred thousand tokens, same features, same design.

Fifteen years separate the bottle-feeding daydream from the evening homework. In between, engineering just changed its vocabulary a little.

"Border radius of 0.25!"

Six-panel comic. At night, a bearded developer with glasses works at his desk, facing a screen labelled 'LLM'. Panel 1: exasperated, he shouts that he asked for border radius of 0.25. Panel 2: the AI, obsequious, tells him he is absolutely right and says it is fixing it immediately. Panel 3: exhausted, he repeats 0.25, not 0.15, not 0.30. Panel 4: the AI solemnly confesses it did not, in fact, take the 0.25 into account. Panel 5: it claims to have checked three times and warns him he is approaching his monthly token limit, while he falls asleep on the keyboard. Panel 6: amazed, he concludes that he did not type a single word and the machine did all the work, as a progress bar shows 98%.

The dev, the AI, and a humble 0.25 border radius. Any resemblance to a real late-night session is entirely intended.

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