A dirge for unintelligent computers

• haven’t you heard? computers can talk now, and think in a human-like manner.

• You can just ask the computer what you want it to do, in words, and it will more or less do it.

  • programming was kind of words, but not really; it was its own thing.
  • the grandest Rube Goldberg machine, constrained only by your imagination, skill, and time it takes you to lay it out.

• the unintelligent computer is dead. Long live the unintelligent computer

• compilers no longer ignore comments.

• I loved unintelligent computers. They were their own weird thing, behaving in weird but exact ways

• anything could be understood, and understanding would reward you with arcane powers

  • the Arcane ways were rewarded

• it used to reward persistence and understanding.

• unintelligent computers were a medium for self-expression and art.

  • the medium still exists, and the community around it is very much alive, but it will die
    • it is not invigorated by a profession’s injection of people, trying new and interesting things, time and effort and money anymore
  • there’s now a distinction between the crafters (who still do it by hand) and the professionals

There’s no need to understand the machine deeply anymore. All these arcane facts about Python and type systems and automatic differentiation and libraries, are not needed anymore. When my Emacs is misbehaving, I used to M-x toggle-debug-on-error, inspect its internal functionality, learn a bit more about the editor and fix it myself. It was not useful knowledge, but it was joyful—a detailed machine, inspectable and modifiable as it runs! Now, I just hit SPC a a s and ask Claude to fix my problem. Things are nicer to use as a result, but I don’t deeply understand the problem anymore.

For coding, the need to inspect agent output is still there. The agents make mistakes: your intent is not clear and gets filled (sometimes in creative, sometimes in hair-pulling ways), and they write extremely verbose code that is difficult to then maintain. (I believe verbose code is more comfortable to agents because of their extremely fast reading speed and relatively shallow mind, whereas humans, recurrent creatures, prefer terse code and comments even at the cost of stacking the tower of abstraction a little higher.)

And yet… it’s for the best. Most people don’t know how to interact with these weird, maniacally rule-following machines. They have too many states for anyone to keep track of, and the people are not curious enough about the arcane to accumulate an understanding. Many other people understand the machines but dislike dealing with them, or have alienating CRUD-pushing enterprise jobs. Freed from the exacting rules, they will be spiritually richer, with temporarily lower wages.

Those who did not understand in the first place but want to use computers for things have their bindings cut, and are set free.

And yet… I am sad. My craft is dying. Young children will not fall in love with the stubborn computer, reshape their brain until they can pedantically follow chains of logical implication until they understand the outcome. They will not feel the pull to dive, over and over, into the belly of a machine made to be comprehensible by people, which has kept complexity at bay, but yet has so much that it is almost overwhelming. They will not dream of making such machines themselves, turning the design in their head over and over until it is functional and beautiful. The current children just ask the AI to make a program. In a few years you won’t even have to navigate app menus anymore, you will ask the AIs to do or track something for you and they will hunt through commands until it is done.

The same will happen to mathematical proof. The same thing happened to hunting and [bow shooting](lars andersen) and [driving stick](fds fdsa). I recognize that it is the same impulse leads ethnic minorities to prop up their culture by law, if they’re able; or deaf parents to desire that their child be deaf too, so the child can relate to the world in a similar way. People who have never experienced these things have no attachment to or desire for them. But it makes me sad nevertheless.