Lurker
Browse every developer. Judge quietly. Close the tab.
$0forever
- Browse every developer profile
- Three (3) free preview posts per month
- Public commit messages and hot takes
- Read-only access to the group chat
No account. No card. No problem.
The safe-for-work developer subscription platform
Get closer to the developers you admire.
Watch a human debug by hand. Read a fourteen-paragraph Jira epic written without AI. Sit in on a retrospective that could have been an email. No AI slop. No code review. Just craft.
As imagined in
The Monorepo TimesCommit WeeklyYAML & LeisureStandup TodayThe Daily Diff
Trending this sprint
Browse all 58Developers worth the context switch.
Hand-picked, heavily stereotyped, and completely fictional. Every one of them has a strongly held opinion about tabs.
Carl Mainframe@cobol_carlI have seen your bank balance, and it is a string.$12 /mo48.3k
YAML Druid@yaml_druidOne space off. Entire cluster down. Such is the path.$9 /mo31.2k
Vibe Coder@vibe_coderIf it compiles, it's a feature. If it ships, it's a lifestyle.$7 /mo69.4k
Ivory Tower@ivory_towerI don't write code. I write diagrams about code.$25 /mo22.1k
Scrum Lord@scrum_lordStandup starts in two minutes. You are not in the standup.$5 /mo44.7k
QA Karen@qa_karenWorks on my machine is not a test plan.$8 /mo57.9k
Legacy Whisperer@legacy_whispererThis code is older than the internet. I speak to it.$14 /mo27.5k
Frontend Fiona@pixel_fionaOne pixel off is a personal attack.$8 /mo41.6k
Browse by obsession
See every categoryFind your type.
COBOL lifers. Vibe coders. Scrum lords. Citizen developers with mission-critical spreadsheets. API purists hand-writing a specification. The entire Silicon Valley cast. Whatever your thing is, someone here has made it their entire personality.
Mainframe
Code older than the internet. Batch jobs older than you.
Vibe Coders
No tests. No plan. No problem.
QA & Test
Someone has to ask about edge cases.
Agile & Scrum
Ceremonies for people who love ceremonies.
Architecture
Boxes and arrows, mostly.
Data & AI
Spreadsheets with delusions of grandeur.
DevOps & SRE
YAML all the way down.
Product & PM
Just one more small thing.
APIs & Contracts
Hand-written Swagger / OpenAPI. Implemented independently. Codegen is cheating.
Silicon Valley
A very specific HBO-shaped trauma. Unauthorized fan parody.
Security
I found a bug in your login form.
Mobile
Waiting for review since Tuesday.
The Silicon Valley wing
All 11 charactersA very specific kind of genius.
Gavin, Gilfoyle, Dinesh and the rest of the Pied Piper / Hooli extended universe. A billionaire with a box, an incubator with a house, and a compression algorithm nobody can explain. Affectionate fan parody of a certain television programme.
Gavin Belson@gavin_belsonI have a vision. It is expensive and slightly unethical.$29 /mo120.4k
Bertram Gilfoyle@gilfoyleI keep the servers alive. I do not keep the small talk alive.$12 /mo98.7k
Dinesh Chugtai@dinesh_chugtaiMiddle-out. Ask me anything.$8 /mo76.3k
Jian Yang@jian_yangIt's not hotdog. It's a lifestyle.$3 /mo64.5k
Unauthorized fan parody.These are fictional characters from a television show, used here for satire and affection. OnlyDevs is not affiliated with HBO, the show's creators, Hooli, Pied Piper, or anyone with three commas. No one from the show has been consulted, which is probably for the best.
Live now
See who's liveSomeone is debugging. Please don't make eye contact.
49.2k people are currently watching a human being patient with a computer. No commentary. No music. Just the occasional sigh.
The craft is the content
The bits that never make it into a pull request.
OnlyDevs is a quiet corner of the internet for people who still care about the work: the naming, the rollback plan, the comment from 1987 that says “temporary fix”.
Watch debugging, by hand
No AI. No autocomplete. Just a human, a breakpoint, and the slow erosion of their confidence. It is the most honest content on the internet.
Read a real Jira epic
Fourteen paragraphs. Acceptance criteria. A glossary. A risk register. Not one sentence generated by a machine. Some of them even have a definition of done.
Sit in on a retrospective
Forty-five minutes of feelings, two action items, and one person who says 'we need to talk about process'. Watch it happen live. Bring a sticky note.
How it works
Three steps. No onboarding funnel.
Step
Make a pretend account
There are no accounts. There is no sign-up form. There is only you, a browse button, and a growing awareness of how much time you spend on Hacker News.
Step
Find your type
COBOL lifers. Vibe coders. Scrum lords. A QA engineer who has seen things. Filter by role, stack, or the specific flavour of burnout you find relatable.
Step
Subscribe for the craft
Every subscription is free and entirely fictional. The developers get nothing. You get the quiet satisfaction of watching someone else's CI run green.
Reviews from the group chat
People are feeling things.
All testimonials are fictional. Several are emotionally accurate. One of them is about you.
I subscribed for the COBOL content. I stayed for the Y2K stories. I have not slept properly since 1999.
Watching someone rebase for forty minutes was the most intimate thing I have seen all year. And I am married.
Finally, a place where 'it works on my machine' is treated as a valid lifestyle rather than a cry for help.
I cancelled my streaming subscriptions. I now watch CI pipelines. The plot is better and the ending is more satisfying.
The Jira epic was fourteen paragraphs and not one of them mentioned AI. I wept in the office. My manager asked if I was okay.
My therapist said I should find community. I found a support group for people who maintain code written before they were born.
Pricing
Compare the tiersFree to lurk. Pay the developer.
Each developer sets their own monthly price. Most base tiers are between $0 and $29, and every subscription is still entirely pretend. No platform fee, no card, no annual plan.
Supporter
One developer, their base price. The price is set by them, not us.
$0–$29/ month
- Everything in Lurker
- That developer's subscriber posts
- Live debugging and replay access
- The quiet satisfaction of supporting a human
Base prices range from $0 to $29/month across the directory.
Patron
The top tier. Whatever the developer charges, it is still pretend.
varies/ month
- Everything in Supporter
- Priority DMs and patron-only posts
- Pairing sessions and cursed architecture reviews
- Your name in a commit message
Every developer sets their own tiers. There is no platform subscription.
Questions, answered
All questionsThe FAQ has a definition of done.
Is this actually OnlyFans?
No. OnlyDevs is a parody and is not affiliated with OnlyFans or any real subscription platform. There are no accounts, no payments, and no explicit content. There are, however, a lot of opinions about indentation.
Do I have to be a developer to use this?
No. Curiosity is enough. You may, however, be asked to explain your branch strategy at some point. A confident mumble is usually fine.
Is there nudity?
Only exposed APIs. Everything on OnlyDevs is safe for work. The spiciest thing you will see is an unformatted XML response at 2am.
Can I actually subscribe or pay?
No. Every subscribe button is theatre. No payment details are collected, no money changes hands, and no developer gets paid. The closest thing to a transaction is a localStorage entry in your own browser.
Are the developers real people?
They are composite characters built from decades of collective developer experience. Any resemblance to your staff engineer is coincidental and, frankly, a little concerning.
Why is it called OnlyDevs?
Because 'LinkedIn, but with a sense of humour' did not fit on the domain. We own onlydevs.us and onlydevs.me. The .com was presumably bought by a very confused person in 2009.
Now auditioning
Are you a developer with a story and no audience?
Bring a monorepo, a strongly held opinion about indentation, and at least one production incident you have not fully processed. We will handle the lighting. There is no lighting.