There's this quote I love from the Bhagavad Gita;
🕉️ "You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions."
— Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 2, Verse 47
Here’s an ancient yet surprisingly modern piece of wisdom from the Bhagavad Gita, a 5,000-year-old philosophical text, that’s been quietly whispering to us:
"Do your work. But let go of the results."
In this post, I want to explore what that means for software engineers, team dynamics, and even how we relate to our tools — including AI.
🛠️ Doing the Work, Writing the Code
As developers, we push code, resolve tickets, squash bugs, ship features, and refactor for hours. But how often do we tie our sense of value to what happens afterward — the likes on a pull request, the product release praise, or even whether that feature gets used?
In the Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna: focus on action, not the outcome. In our world, that translates to:
- Writing quality code
- Thinking through edge cases
- Designing scalable architecture
- Reviewing PRs thoughtfully
- Contributing to team health and documentation
Your effort, craft, and intent matter. That is your domain — your right.
But once the code is merged?
Once it's in the hands of users or product managers?
Once that startup pivot happens and your feature is shelved?
You are no longer in control. The "fruit" of your work may be used, abused, ignored, or never released.
And that’s okay.
💼 The Modern Workplace and Detachment
The Bhagavad Gita’s wisdom is not a call to apathy — it’s a call to detached responsibility.
In tech culture, we’re often taught to own outcomes — and yes, accountability matters. But unhealthy attachment to metrics like:
- 🚀 Feature adoption
- ⭐ GitHub stars
- 💰 Performance bonuses
- 📊 Story points completed
…can lead to burnout, resentment, or imposter syndrome.
Instead, what if we measured success by:
- ✨ Craft over clout
- 🛠️ Process over perfection
- 📈 Progress over praise
The Gita reminds us that detachment doesn’t mean disinterest — it means freedom from what you can’t control, so you can focus fully on what you can.
🤖 The AI Analogy: Action Without Attachment
Let’s take an AI model as an example.
A transformer-based model like GPT processes input and produces output based on probability-weighted patterns. It has no expectation, no ego, no desire for praise or criticism. It "works" — and then lets go.
You prompt it. It responds. The rest — your feedback, your use case, your success or failure — isn’t its burden.
Isn’t that kind of… divine?
While humans shouldn’t aim to be emotionless machines, we can learn from this:
act with full presence, release attachment to results.
🧪 Real-World Scenarios for Devs
Let’s bring it home with some examples:
🔹 You wrote tests and CI/CD scripts — but the deploy still failed.
→ You did your duty. Learn and move on.🔹 You proposed a better architectural decision — but the team didn’t adopt it.
→ You voiced your perspective. That’s leadership.🔹 Your open source library didn't go viral.
→ You built something useful. That’s creation. That’s enough.
🧘🏼♀️ Practical Takeaways for Developers
Here are ways to embody this Gita mindset at work:
✅ Shift focus from praise to process
✅ Celebrate small wins — writing clean code is its own reward
✅ Separate your self-worth from your JIRA board
✅ Offer ideas without clinging to being right
✅ Don't burn out for a fruit that was never yours to hold
🧑💻 Final Thought: Code with Intention, Release with Detachment
The Gita doesn’t say don’t care. It says:
→ care deeply about the work itself, not what it brings you.
In a profession where we solve endless puzzles and often don’t control what happens after we hit “merge,” that mindset isn’t just spiritual — it’s sustainable.
Whether you're shipping your first pull request, maintaining legacy code, or mentoring juniors — keep coding, keep learning, and let go of the fruit.
Your work is enough.
🙏 Thanks for reading.
If this resonated with you, drop a comment — or share your own dev-philosophy fusion stories!
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