Most of the tools on this site solve a specific problem: count tokens, format YAML, check a Terraform plan. This post is about the other kind. These seven are in the new Just for Fun section of the tools page. They're built for the Slack channel, the retro, and the moment someone says "it should be a quick fix."
Each one is a joke, but most of them are hiding a real idea about how engineering teams work. All of them run in your browser.
1. Meeting Cost Calculator
The joke: a live dollar counter for your meeting. The real idea: a weekly hour with six people can cost more than a SaaS contract nobody would approve without a review.
Add attendees by role, set the length, and see the cost per meeting and per year, including the roughly 23 minutes engineers need to get back into focus afterwards. Press Start meeting and put it on the shared screen. Meetings get shorter. The math behind it is in How Much Does a Meeting Really Cost?.
2. Estimate Reality Converter
The joke: turns "2 days" into "6.9 working days." The real idea: estimates cover the work you can see, and the risks compound.
Enter an estimate and tick what applies: "someone called it a quick fix," "requirements live in a Slack thread," "depends on another team's API," "the AI will write it." It compounds the multipliers, applies Hofstadter's Law (it always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter's Law into account), and gives you a realistic number plus a 90% range to tell your PM. There's also a decoder for status updates: "I'm 90% done" means the second 90% starts tomorrow.
3. Yak Shave Depth Meter
The joke: you set out to fix a typo and ended up reinstalling Homebrew. The real idea: naming the chain is how you notice you're in it.
List each step that led to the next, starting with the original task. The meter measures how deep you are, identifies the yak species (package manager spelunking, runtime version roulette, the rewrite-it-in-Rust impulse), and rates the shave from "Light trim" to "You are the yak." Then it points at the original task and the step most likely to have a shortcut.
4. Legacy Code Carbon Dater
The joke: carbon dating for code. The real idea: code carries its era with it, and knowing the era tells you how carefully to tread.
Paste a file with no history and it looks for about 40 "fossils," features and habits that were only common for a few years: var self = this, $(document).ready, Python 2 print, React class components, optional chaining, and the occasional "Certainly! Here's the updated code" left in by someone pasting an AI reply. It estimates a vintage, names the era (from "Mainframe Jurassic" to "The Agentic Age"), and gives handling instructions. Files that mix ancient and modern code get flagged as a haunted house with one renovated room.
5. Rubber Duck Debugger
The joke: a rubber duck with a chat window. The real idea: rubber duck debugging works. Explaining a bug out loud, step by step, forces you to check the assumption you skipped.
This duck adds the questions a senior engineer would ask. Say "it works on my machine" and it asks you to list every difference between environments. Mention an error and it asks you to read the whole message out loud, including the boring part. Say "it suddenly stopped working" and it asks what changed. Type "fixed" when you find it. The duck accepts payment in breadcrumbs. There's no AI and no server: it's a duck.
6. Developer Excuse Generator
The joke: excuses for standup, formatted for Slack, Jira, or a very official postmortem. The real idea: honestly, none. It's just funny.
Pick a theme (Classic, Cloud & DevOps, AI era, Frontend, or Meetings) and generate. The AI-era set includes "the agent fixed the test by deleting it" and "my CLAUDE.md said 'be careful' and it was not careful." There's a believability meter and an excuse of the day. Please don't use these in a real postmortem.
7. Meeting Buzzword Bingo
The joke: bingo for your next all-hands. The real idea: if everyone can predict the phrases, the meeting might be saying less than it sounds.
Four decks: Standup & Sprint, AI Hype, All-Hands, and Cloud & DevOps. Every visitor gets a different card, so the whole team can play at once. Tap phrases as you hear them; five in a row lights up the card. "Agentic," "circle back," and "it's DNS" are all in there.
Why build these at all?
Because the serious tools get used when someone has a problem, and the fun ones get shared when someone doesn't. A meeting cost number in a calendar invite or a yak shave screenshot in Slack starts a better conversation than a memo about focus time. And every engineer has been 11 levels deep in a yak shave at least once.
If you have an idea for one that should exist, tell me. The bar is "would I send this to my team?"