Here’s the thing about programmers who guard their APIs like they’re protecting the nuclear football: they’ve never met a malicious complier. And by that I mean someone who reads your rules—really reads them—and uses them against you like a contract lawyer at Thanksgiving.

This 25-year vet walked onto a project where some territorial genius had locked down an API tighter than his emotional availability. “Don’t use this field,” the guy says. “It’s not for that.” So our hero does the thing you’re not supposed to do: he uses it exactly as specified, which is to say—not at all. Just clean, clinical adherence to the letter of the law while the spirit gets left in the parking lot. The comments section is chef’s kiss—one guy points out that marking anything “Final” is basically a curse word in software (“Immediately doomed to updates”), and another suggests that if you’re dumb enough to leave a freeform, user-definable field in your API, well, don’t be shocked when someone fills it with atom charges or—I don’t know—the complete text of Ulysses. Why not?

The real comedy is watching control freaks get hoist by their own petard. They don’t want you touching their thing, so they write rules. Then they don’t like how you follow the rules. It’s like my uncle telling me not to go in the basement and then getting mad I’m reading his old magazines down there. You said I could go in the basement, Gary.

Here’s the closer: Ten years later, someone’s probably still maintaining that API, still angry, still convinced the problem is everyone else’s territoriality. But the problem was always simpler—he just learned the hard way that when you try to control engineers, they don’t rebel. They smile, nod, and then they follow your instructions so precisely you’ll wish they’d rebelled instead.