title: "Oran the Dev Cat — Ep.1: The Prompt Programmer"
published: true
series: "Oran the Dev Cat"
tags: beginners, webdev, career, programming
Oran is an orange cat with no computer science degree.
He learned to code the way most cats do — late at night, alone, watching online courses he bought on sale. JavaScript. Python. A little SQL. Enough to build things that work, not enough to explain why they work.
But Oran could build. And in 2025, that was enough to get hired.
Rust-Belt Manufacturing is a mid-size factory two hours from the nearest tech hub. They make industrial parts — bolts, brackets, fittings. The kind of stuff that holds bridges together but never trends on Twitter.
They posted one job listing: "IT Developer — build our internal systems."
No mention of a team. No mention of an architect or a QA engineer. Just one line at the bottom:
"We need someone who can figure things out."
Oran applied. Oran got the job.
Day one. Oran got a desk, a laptop, and a requirements doc — three pages, written by the factory manager in bullet points:
- Track production orders
- Manage inventory
- Let different departments see different things
- "Make it like SAP but simple"
Oran opened Cursor, cracked his knuckles, and started prompting.
"Build a production order management system with
inventory tracking, user login, and role-based
access. Use Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL."
Code poured out. Models, routes, schemas, migrations. Oran reviewed it, tweaked a few things, prompted again. By Wednesday he had a working prototype. By Friday he demoed it to the boss.
"This is great," the boss said. "Ship it."
Oran felt invincible. He wrote a tweet that night:
"Day 5 at new job. Full system prototype done. AI is the real senior developer. 🐱"
He got 47 likes. A reply said "king." Another said "this is the future of engineering."
Oran believed them.
But here's what Oran didn't notice during his speed run:
He never talked to the warehouse team. He never sat with the finance department. He never asked anyone what "different departments see different things" actually meant in practice.
He built what the requirements doc said. Word for word. Prompt for prompt.
He didn't know it yet, but the requirements doc was wrong.
Not wrong as in typos. Wrong as in — the factory manager wrote what he thought the system should do, not what the teams actually needed.
And Oran, riding high on demo-day dopamine, didn't think to question it.
That would come on Monday.
Next episode: Oran meets the users. And learns that "role-based access" means something very different to the warehouse manager, the accountant, and the factory floor supervisor.
Oran's journey is brought to you by SysLayer — practical backend guides for developers who build real products.
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