Context is king!

Of course, his usage was always related specifically to giving LLM-driven technologies more context, more text, and more everything. It wasn’t just about volume either, it was often specifically about how to craft what was being written for LLMs to get the most out of them.

The whole situation was really unfortunate. This co-worker is not dumb by any stretch. In fact, he was probably the single most intellectually intimidating person I dealt with the whole time I worked there—certainly more interesting than the mental midgets in the C-suite or anyone with a title of “vice-president.” However, he ate it up and ate it up and ate it up some more. He started to sound like another unfortunate co-worker.

I suspect, after the bubble bursts, we ask ourselves, “What now?” We’ll also have to ask, “How did this happen to otherwise intelligent people?” I’m sure plenty of us are already asking, but the conversation will be much broader as it always is the the wake of devastation. In this case I believe it was a combination of company pressure, the builtin engagement and gambling addiction, and I genuinely believe a lot of us who wrap our identities up in being “smart” love hearing just how smart and insightful we are.

God knows I do. (Another reason I avoid this stuff. Know thy self!)

LLMs as deployed are very good at telling us just that! This is why business leaders who eat this stuff up go nuts. I know for a fact my prior CEO is basically the most cardboard character in this regard. There were plenty of first hand accounts internally about him drawing his inspirations from Grok. He is the CEO who has decided chatbots¹ have unlocked his superhuman potential rather than expose him has a fairly weak leader with no new ideas.

I digress—which, I realize, is something I do every other paragraph,

The “context is king” comment infuriated me every time it was said or written. It wasn’t just this one co-worker either, but rather legions of the LLM-drunk “engineers.” Annoyingly, it is just as much an excuse as a directive. It’s a fancy version of, “Well, you’re prompting it wrong.” While that is more than enough to feel justifiable rage, I have to ask what feels like the obvious follow up:

Why did you only start caring about context when we were feeding mountains of text to machines that do not think and do not reason? Why is it that our human co-workers or even our future selves were not good enough reason for this very thing? And as always, the irony pops up again. Had you been doing this from day one, you would have looked like a genius when the bots arrived. (Or in theory anyway, I certainly didn’t! I was branded a luddite.)

In principle, I agree with the statement “context is king.” This is the very reason I care a lot about metadata and continuously refine how I use it. It’s so distressing that people were never a good enough reason to do this kind of work. I think this speaks a lot about the mentality of particular individuals as well.

Fuel for the toys and tools is a good reason.

Compassion for our co-workers? Nah.

Concern about sustainability and longevity of your work? Rubbish.

As much as I love to talk about software as a fairly degenerate industry (because it is), I think this is also a good time to focus and just how utterly hapless and braindead executives are. This might be the first time I am aware of that I could get the average tech CEO to even maybe care about context or perhaps give directives that context is important and essential. As with the programmers, humans—and in this case customers as much as any of their employees—were not good enough. When the idea of reducing humans in the workplace became the dream, context was worth emphasis and even executive decrees.

Context is worth the cost for bots but certainly not for the people. Got it.

Why can we never just use our powers for good? Why is it always this?

Personal Context

It’s not precisely related, but I had two things I wanted to write about and this allows me to tie them together under a single entry.

I think a lot of people misunderstand my position on LLMs. I do not have any particular problem with LLMs as a technology. It’s very interesting technology. The world is full of interesting technology though. The problem is that technologies are not used in a vacuum. There is context for their use, their effects, and their byproducts.

I have been characterized as a luddite by some people I know. Make no mistake, being laid off was influenced heavily by my refusal to use it in the workplace, being a vocal opponent of how it was deployed and why it was being used, as well as my concerns about the religious tone corporate adoption was taking².

I just do not see the point of exploring the use of LLMs right now for code right now. I watched a very enjoyable video by ThePrimeagen that hit home for a number of reasons, and at the end he talks about exploring this tech for what are, on their face, good reasons. Is it useful? Can it improve my flows? Can it help me in a way where it doesn’t drive?

I know enough smart people who I trust who are answering these questions with a “yes.”

So why not me? If I think the tech can be used in a way that helps, why don’t I use it?

I’ve been plenty vocal about my ethical reasoning, which is much more expansive than “this technology is evil” or “this technology is displacing people.”

I do believe there is a lot of certifiable evil coming from the companies that are pushing this technology. I definitely do not believe that people like Dario Amodei are somehow unaware or detached from the gravity of what their entities are doing. (I think him being a “true believer” might actually be scarier than him just being yet another stock corporate villain, but this is not good in any direction.)

I believe how it is being used to threaten to displace people is also a very terrible thing. This is where the myth making and realities do not align. Your corporate overlords certainly wish to believe and, more dangerously, exploit this myth.

There’s much more to it than that. Others, such as Baldur Bjarnason and Johannes Link have already done great work at explaining this. I agree with pretty much every point both of these individuals have made.

Unfortunately, the ethical issues seem to fall on many deaf ears in tech circles. The only people who care about them are readily discarded by supposed neutral technology authorities who don’t want to talk about anything but the technology in and of itself, including Linus Torvalds.

There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but “is it useful” is no longer one of those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn’t actually used it.

Yes, it can also be a somewhat painful tool, both for maintainer workloads and just from a “it keeps finding embarrassing bugs” standpoint.

But the solution is not to put your head in the sand and sing “La La La, I can’t hear you” at the top of your voice like some people seem to do.

Yeah Linus, I agree. Here’s the thing though, not factoring in the non-technical elements of the tool is your own variation on, “La La La, I can’t hear you.”

He also says:

Sure, the social angle of working on open source is important and often a very motivating part of the project, but in the end that’s a side benefit, not the point of the project.

This is NOT some kind of “social warrior” project, never has been, and never will be.

You don’t have to be a “social warrior” project to benefit immensely from the social and legal aspects of a project. The use of the GNU General Public License is no less important to the success of Linux as the technology itself. This is not merely a “side benefit.”

You cannot look at Linux, its use, or its success merely as a technological success. Those chosen license was key in keeping the Linux ecosystem out from under the auspice of a single corporate entity. It has been key in the growth and protection of many core open source projects. This seems pretty important for other load-bearing tools such as git.

Technology does not exist in a vacuum. Not Linux. Not LLMs. Anyone who thinks the licensing aspect isn’t that important doesn’t realize how much Microsoft was able to absolutely strangle innovation on the web for about a decade until mobile browsing became big enough to displace desktops where Microsoft had a de facto monopoly. (Web developers in that era probably remember how many hours of their lives went to making stuff work in IE 6. It was not fun.) Microsoft was especially famous in this era for “embrace extend, and extinguish.” This both a killer and existential threat to may technologies of the first decade of the twenty-first century.³

Why bother though? Linus himself is happy to brush aside anything that isn’t technical. I feel like this, in a very distant sense, is related to context only mattering when it was for machines rather than people. I can’t put my finger on it specifically, but it’s a common character flaw in the industry.

When I discuss the matters with technologists these days, I don’t discuss ethics at all. I don’t talk about the way the tools are deployed right now harm the development of the next generation. I don’t bother with thought rot, code quality, sustainability, plagiarism, or any other mere ethical issues. I’m not going to talk about right-wing poisoning or teenage suicide. These are too complicated and, apparently, unimportant in the wake of “amazing” tools.

I am left to focus on what I think is the real fundamental gravity of it all right now: the economics. Over the past 12-18 months I’ve got to see the likes of Ed Zitron go from basically some blogger out there to being interviewed on Bloomberg⁴. The only question I want answered from the technologists drunk on the usage of LLMs is this:

How much would you pay for the output?

This is all heavily subsidized. The prices are not coming down significantly anytime soon and will, in fact, increase because if they do not the technology disappears. I think there is a case to be made for someone casually being aware of how all of this works and how it may be incorporated if it were sustainable. I do not see a case for people who have dedicated time and energy to their current workflows.

Do you really want to become reliant on a technology for your profession that you might not be able to afford in a few months? There are certainly complexities for those who are forced to use it—to which I say, go all in, your employer absolutely deserves the output and the cost. For those who become evangelists? This is pure insanity. If your primary concern about your project management system is how well data can be fed to an LLM, you are putting a lot of time, energy, and skill development in a very silly place.

I was glad to see Cory Doctorow, someone noteworthy, say something along these lines. In this interview he, an experienced writer, talks about his use of LLMs as a sort of “plug-in” and the interviewer also talks about how she gets some use out of the technology. He asks how useful it would be, more or less, if she had to pay what it actually cost.

This detail entirely obfuscates the ROI and general usefulness of the tech. For me to evaluate it—in terms of a pure technology—I would need to be able to understand what I had to give up to use it. You cannot meaningfully evaluate the general applicability or whether it belongs in your workflow without having some idea of what tasks cost.

There is a part of me—a part that I admit is not one of my better qualities—who looks forwarding to the weeping of Babylon when these companies are forced to play within their means and find a way to turn a profit. It will happen—either that or they simply collapse. We cannot throw money into the furnace forever. This industry has been built on the ignorance of venture capitalists—Zitron calls it “venture welfare,” which is brilliant.

While venture capitalists are never going to win any prizes for their intellect, their simple motivation—a need to turn a profit—is going to win out. It’s the nature of their game. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta are drunk on the idea of profit and growth, not the technology for its own sake. The moment one of them wakes up to the reality that profit is never coming from this use of LLMs, I will prepare for those Babylonian tears. They’ll come fast. They’ll come hard. They’ll be delicious. No amount of “La La La, I can’t hear you” will stop it.

I probably shouldn’t laugh in the face of addicts unable to get their fix… but hey, nobody’s perfect.

John had always been close to the hardware end of things. His labs had breadboards, oscilloscopes, soldering irons, and a number of other similar items. In my early days as a quasi-apprentice, he was trying to get me to dive into these aspects of technology. About this time, I attempted to learn C and realized each and every time that I absolutely hated it. I sense my initial exposure to Logo in grade school had me far more connected with higher level languages and more abstract outputs. Being “close to the metal” has never really interested me¹.

Both the book and the calculator have mostly collected dust for the past three decades and have always had far more sentimental value than practical value. I figured it would just stay that way.

My older son recently started learning Algebra and while helping him with a recent assignment I watched as he was doing long multiplication and division by hand. “Bud, you know you can use a calculator now, right? There is no reason to ever do this by hand again unless you have no other choice.” This was certainly a relief to him.

I don’t know if it’s a strange quirk of my household or perhaps my children’s generation, but they love “retro” things. My daughter has a turntable and some old vinyl. My older son has a collection of pocket watches—some of them date back to the late 19th century. My youngest son likes old cameras, film and digital alike, and loves wooden hand planes—so much so that he includes them anthropomorphically in most of his drawings. Apparently, the convenience of our age is just too much.

This fascination extends to all sorts of things. Something that looks decades old seems especially interesting to them. My sons both have a fondness for older Nerf blasters. I don’t get it, but I get it. They often ask me to comment on how “cool” some old thing is and I remind them how much I prefer convenience and how my phone can probably do whatever some other device does better and faster. They do not care—not at all.

So, when I showed him how to pull up a calculator on any of the laptops, iPads, or phones in the house he had one thing on his mind. “Don’t you have that old calculator somewhere?”

“What, you mean that one in my room? The one John gave me.”

“Yeah. Can I use that one?”

I explained that it was “weird” and, of course, this did nothing to dissuade him—quite the opposite of course, which seems obvious as I write this. We went upstairs and I dug the calculator out of keepsake bin. I tried to turn it on but I imagine its batteries had been very dead for some time. No problem though. We popped out the little watch batteries, found the model, ordered new ones, and waited. (Less than 24 hours no less, a point of convenience they actually enjoy.)

As soon as the batteries arrived we put them in, pressed the ON button, and… were disappointed. The calculator failed to power up. I was rather dejected. The idea that it would see use again was something I really liked poetically, almost like John’s spirit or essence was helping another generation learn math. When the screen showed nothing, I felt a very sharp pang in my chest and tried to immediately defuse it.

“That really sucks, but it’s okay. I mean, this thing is really old and hasn’t been used in years. You’ll just have to use something else.” I put it back in the keepsake bin and tried not to think about it. It ate at me nonetheless. John was gone and so was his calculator.

The seed, however, was planted. Both of my sons spent the day looking on eBay for RPN calculators and even discovered that SwissMicros makes a successor to said calculator in the DM42n. They were not letting this go. They kept updating me on new finds. My older son had become fixated on using an RPN calculator.

A funny side note—which I’ll get back to—they realized a calculator they had seen on my father-in-law’s desk was an HP-15C. He had used it back in his days at IBM and still uses to this day. RPN was apparently in their blood.

Like many things with cult-like devotion which are no longer produced, buying one is expensive. In no universe was I dropping $200+ for a 30-year-old calculator that, while kinda neat, is something my phone can do. The fancy SwissMicros can be had for a cool $429. Ugh. Just no.

I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me in the first place, but as my sons were talking about saving up money to get one of these things, I knew they were serious and it jolted me to action.

“You know, this is something we can probably fix.”

It didn’t take long either. About five minutes of searching the web lead me to a 21-year-old forum post². I followed the instructions, got a little piece of copper wire I had on hand from installing a new light switch, discharged the memory, replaced the batteries, and voila, it powered right up.

I was both exhilarated and felt a great sense of relief. I wanted this thing to work and it worked. My son immediately wanted to start using it and began asking questions that I didn’t really have answers for. John had instructed me on using an RPN calculator 32 years ago. About the only thing I remembered was that the operator was entered after the operands, but very little else.

With some fumbling, I remembered how to do mostly basic arithmetic which was good enough for now. While there is no shortage of online literature and videos on the matter³, his grandfather had and RPN calculator as well. I thought this would be a much better and meaningful form of information exchange. My son did some tinkering and, on the weekend when we visited his grandparents for dinner, he sat down with his grandfather to get a tour on using an RPN calculator. He’s already better at it than I ever was!

A few days later, I find myself sitting at the dinner table with my son helping him with ratio equations. As we converted various volumes and weights, and I watched him hammer the numbers in, the elegance of RPN was readily apparent. The impatient teenager in me had dismissed it years ago, but it seems John still has some posthumous lessons for me and, more importantly, for my children.

Maybe I should finally read Digital Fundamentals.

It’s the perfect movie for an angsty budding nihilist looking at a world that doesn’t really make any sense at all and feeling totally conflicted with himself.

As I have grown, the scene that sticks out in my head more than any other involves the convenience store clerk Raymond K. Hessel. Tyler Durden orders him out of the store at gunpoint and tells him he’s going to die. Tyler goes through his wallet:

Tyler: An expired community college student ID. What did you study, Raymond?

Raymond: S-s-stuff.

Tyler: Stuff? Were the mid-terms hard? I asked you what you studied!

Raymond: Biology mostly.

Tyler: Why?

Raymond: I don’t know.

Tyler: What did you wanna be, Raymond?

Silence and whimpering. Tyler cocks the hammer of his revolver.

Tyler: The question, Raymond was, “What did you want to be!?”

Jack: Answer him, Raymond! Jesus!

Raymond: Veterinarian! Veterinarian!

Tyler: Animals.

Raymond: Yeah animals and stuff.

Tyler: And stuff, yeah I got that. That means you have to get more schooling.

Raymond: Too much school.

Tyler: Would you rather be dead? Would you rather die? Here, on your knees in the back of a convenience store?

Raymond: No, please no!

Tyler: I’m keeping your license. I’m gonna check in on you. I know where you live. If you’re not on your way to becoming a veterinarian in six weeks, you will be dead. Now run on home.

Raymond runs off into the night.

Jack: Come on, this isn’t funny! That wasn’t funny! What the fuck was the point of that!?

Tyler: Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of Raymond K. Hessel’s life. His breakfast will taste better than any meal you and I have ever tasted.

At my last couple jobs, we’ve had a running joke when a friend gets laid off or canned for cause where those of us still grinding away at unfulfilling jobs request of the departed, “Please tell us how your breakfast tastes tomorrow.” My current job—well, technically current in the strange sense that tomorrow is last day on the paperwork despite being locked out and laid off this morning—has presented my group with many opportunities to make this joke. Today was my day. Tomorrow will be my breakfast.

We knew a “reorganization” was coming. It’s been “coming” for like two months. There’s been considerable anxiety on my team about what was happening, if we’d be split up, who would be blasted into space, etc. I had said on a few occasions not to be surprised if I was on the list. My AI stance was very much at odds with the religion¹ of our CEO and utterly hapless VP of Engineering—someone who I was sure was himself an AI until a good friend claimed to have met said VP in person.² I don’t really care about the metrics. I’m expensive. I’m one of the last remote holdouts because I’m not giving this miserable organization another hour plus of my day with a commute.

My team dismissed the idea. I’m the lead. People who actually work with me are aware that not only am I a pretty good programmer who does good work, but I am a mentor and force multiplier for a team. I’m the primary designer. I have considerable domain knowledge and years of experience. I have a very emotional manner that can be infectious—for both good and bad. My old mentor was the first person to point this out to me in my late 20s.

You need to be careful. Your mood sets the mood of the whole office. If you believe, they believe. If you doubt, they doubt.

Although I thought cutting me was a stupid idea, the company is a sea of incompetence—particularly as you progress up the chain of command. The organization is run by people who have no idea how their company operates, what the systems do, and who is actually important to maintaining those systems. The two with the most power over my department firmly believe that RSI is just around the corner and doubling down on AI when the rest of the industry is having their, “Oh fuck, maybe this isn’t what we thought,” moment is going to save the day. This checks out. The place is a perennial³ also-ran. They’re typically 6-12 months behind the average industry latecomer.

Anxiety is always high because the people who do important work know that it’s actually entirely irrelevant. I had to accept that if I knew my superiors were clueless that my importance or impact was as irrelevant as any other. As it turns out, much to the shock of my team, I was right. I think I was ready for it more than everyone else.

While I’ve become something of a nihilist in recent years, there are still chunks of events that take place in my life that feels like maybe, just maybe, there is some greater element of fate or meaning or whatever. I know this is like a Psych 101 cognitive bias. We want to make sense—personal sense—of our experiences and observations.

Having said all of that, I don’t really care whether the universe is lining up big changes for me or if the fact that I think that’s at play is motivating and as such self fulfilling. Who cares? Does it matter? I know how I choose to read the tea leaves today. It beats the hell out of despair or trying to make sense out of how so much hard work, dedication, and self was poured into an entity that deserved none of it—not from me and not from many other good people. The exchange, despite the paychecks, was never equitable.

I felt it coming. I know what I have to do anyway.

The question, Raymond was, “What did you want to be!?”

My own captain.

So… let’s… fucking… go! I’m gonna get some mates and we’re gonna chart our own course this time. No more bosses. No more psychopaths. The dysfunction and nonsense will be of our own making. I think I might be delusional enough to make it work.

I wonder what I should have for breakfast tomorrow morning.

It wasn’t one event either. It was several that ended with me quitting early because, why not?

Today started like many days in recent history. I could not convince myself to get out bed. I had an 8:30am meeting and just thought, “Oh well, next one ain’t till 10:00am. Fuck it.” I sort of rolled in around nine-something. The slight difference this morning was the nagging, “Why has this been so frequent lately?”¹ I haven’t even bothered getting dressed or showering the past couple weeks. It’s straight from my bed to the computer and my new ball cap conceals my bed head too well.

Around 11:00am, a friend of mine posted this interview with Andrew Kelly of Zig fame in a shared Discord channel. It’s a great interview on every level. It’s not just about a guy who loves his project, but a guy who understands sustainability and the the art of work. The more programmers I hear talk about the general awfulness of the corporate world, the more I feel I’m not crazy. Some of these people, like Andrew, are a huge inspiration. The timing of sharing this interview was funny too since I just defended Zig sort of indirectly over their excellent stance on AI, which is covered in the interview.

This guy is living the fucking dream, and I do not mean that ironically. He is doing good work and good and not compromising it. This is awesome for him. This is awesome for humanity. Unfortunately, this also begs the question, “What the fuck am I doing?” I was asking myself that as I was working on a major refactor that I couldn’t really concentrate on.

By the time noon rolled around I went to a coffee shop down the street with my sons. They wanted pastries and I was out of coffee. I needed beans and I needed a quad shot of espresso really badly. While I normally spend about fifteen minutes there, I figured after about two hours of distracted work that I needed a full hour for lunch. I struck up a conversation with the new barista, much to the chagrin of my sons who are less than thrilled when I start ranting to strangers, and let time pass.

I rarely take lunch breaks beyond eating. I never have. I have shit to do and taking a break is decidedly not doing shit. I do not recommend this approach at all, by the way. I am explaining this because:

1. Taking a real lunch break is unusual for me unless some kind of plans are involved.
2. I actually took one today in an entirely impromptu manner.

In isolation, this isn’t that big of a deal. Today? “What’s wrong with you? Who needs an hour to regroup after half-assing it for two hours?” (Yes, I have a relatively abusive relationship with myself which is really part of the whole problem.) I got home, coded some more, and finished the interview. The entire time I couldn’t help but keep thinking back to The Worlds Left To Conquer which I read a few weeks ago. The author, Nik Suresh, is also living the fucking dream.

Before 5:00pm I was so over the work day. I was just over it. I didn’t get as far as I wanted but tests were passing and I felt incredibly lethargic and depressed. So, like an old lady, I drew a bath and decided to finish What The Goddamn Hell Is Going On In The Tech Industry? and since I finished it before I was done soaking, I looked for something else.

On Burnout, Mental Health, And Not Being Okay caught my eye because, obviously, I’m burnt out. I’m burnt out badly. This was particularly impactful because five minutes before reading this I was like, “Nik Suresh is living the fucking dream.” You know it because I said so just a couple paragraphs ago! This is another great essay. Go read it, even if you’re okay.

Let me be clear about something, I am burnt out. Like the real kind. Not the kind I mention in passing all the time. “Yeah, I’m burnt out, but it’s fine. I can put in another weekend.” That’s how I’ve dealt with this feeling as of late (by which I mean for like a decade). The complete lack of motivation coupled with the joyless work has been terrible. The AI zombie apocalypse has made it much, much worse too.

Today though, I really felt it. Or maybe I really recognized it as an actual problem rather than my status quo.

Andrew Kelly talked directly about this in his interview. It is clearer and clearer that there is an emotional and moral cost to working for a soulless and dysfunctional company—and make no mistake, my day job is absolutely with a completely soulless and utterly dysfunctional company². I took to writing for much the same reason Nik Suresh did. I had to talk about all the nonsense and get it out. Weights and Measures is aimed directly at the stock villains that make up the leadership where I work. The oppression of the business idiots is immense on everyone beneath them, but it is born most heavily by those of us who care about our work and work hard for reasons beyond a job. We’ll work hard no matter what because it’s a part of our being.

My identity is, sadly, tied to my professional output for a lot of very stupid historical reasons that seem to require Herculean efforts to overcome. I’m working on it! But I’m too tired from my day job to make very much progress.

I care a lot about my team and direct co-workers. They’re a really good crew. We’re in the trenches together and there’s a special camaraderie that’s always come with that. My team is also blessedly devoid of any corporate true believers or apologists. We know the score. We know the difference between what our leaders say and what they mean. We know we’re expendable the moment someone says “our position is strong” and “things are going great.” We know “reorganization” is code for this quarter’s Jack Welch style blood bath. We know AI is just read herring.

My team is the reason I work. I have found solace in my place as a leader who leads by example rather than from some secure undisclosed location. Mentoring gives me some actual life satisfaction that I know transcends the corporate environment. The work itself, even if the output is entirely for the profit of said soulless and dysfunctional organization, is still a chance to keep my skills sharp. (Working around the nightmare of the dumbest infrastructure I have ever encountered is also a rite of passage I guess.) I also care to do right by our customers, even if only on the basis that I believe in being honest with people who are spending money on a service and acting in their best interest.

Till recently, this has been enough to carry on. In fact, work has been a welcome distraction. The death of my old mentor was one of a handful of deaths that’s come in my middle years, including my younger brother a little over two years ago. The related revelations it brought me about my own family and religious beliefs have been difficult to digest in their own right. Work was the place to bury it and, at the same time, provide for my family. See! Look at me! I’m being useful even if I’m completely miserable and coming apart at the seams. I can just wait for the anguish to pass in a background process while I get shit done!

Astute readers will probably note that this is not healthy behavior. It’s not. I know this. I haven’t actually done anything about it though because of a little lie I keep telling myself.

My manager and I were having a conversation late in the day when we were pushing some code after hours a few months back. He was two hours ahead at the time and I had joked that, “Just one more thing,” was going on my urn or tombstone or whatever. We laughed because I knew he had the same problem. I was telling him to get off Slack. One more thing though.

Adulthood is saying “but after this week things will slow down a bit” over and over until you die.

I’ve seen variations on this quote many times. It’s hilarious because it’s true which, of course, is why there’s nothing funny about it at all.

Next week turns into next year and then next decade faster than most of us realize until it’s too late. Time passes. Things change. We put off and miss what matters to tend to this modern rat maze we’ve constructed in the industrialized world. On one hand I basically have on demand food for the tiny slice of human history that this has been available. At the same time I am very empty. Many of us feel this creeping, awful emptiness in a land and time of plenty—even if plenty is being further consolidated by billionaire psychopaths, but I’d argue it’s still better than being a peasant 500 years ago.

In April of this year, I found myself at the edge of an event horizon of sorts. While on a business trip my wife texted me saying we needed to “discuss our dynamic” which is exactly the way she’d go about phrasing such a serious topic. To those who know, there is nothing good about a message like this from your spouse. Without diving into details, what followed was a situation that left me with no alternative but to stop putting my own life off until next whatever time interval.

The only serious option was a very swift reckoning about my life choices to this point and realization of what I had left behind and why and for how long.

Today marked the point where the emergency response panic has worn off. The situation has been triaged, changes have been put in place for the better, and the all important reflection is in full force. It’s by no means the end and it really isn’t meant to be a journey with an end. I’m past figuring out what to do and have moved on to mostly just doing it.

In this process I have managed to connect, for the first time in years, with my own family beyond the role of some kind of provider and enforcer who happens to occupy the same house. That’s realistically been my role for a while. The circumstances of my professional life and obligations related to it have left me sucked dry. By the time after hours work has ended, dad is not a very nice guy who is entirely out of patience.

As the Smiths sang in Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now:

I was looking for a job and then I found a job
And heaven knows I’m miserable now

In my life, oh, why do I give valuable time
To people who don’t care
If I live or I die?

Why does my wife get a combative and angry bastard while the pinhead who makes decisions based solely on bad metrics on spreadsheets at my place of business gets my best work? Why do my kids have to deal with someone with nothing left because his CEO—who talks to fucking Grok for inspiration—got it all instead? I am nothing but a resource to be exploited to both of these individuals.

This has changed because it had to. It should have a long time ago—a long time ago. That’s the trap of “next week.” It so easily becomes “next year,” before it invariably becomes “next decade” and the cliché kicks in where your babies are no longer babies. We know we’re never going to wish we spent more time at the office on our deathbeds, but well before death comes calling we have shit to do! For people who don’t care if we live or die—people who would do anything in their power to pay us as little as possible and then applaud themselves for it. We’re a society driven by fucking psychopaths! I wish that wasn’t it, but it’s where we are.

We reward and empower the very worst and they reward us with the very worst!

I want to be more understanding about this. I desperately want to believe there is something with more complexity and nuance going on among corporate and political leaders. There is not. The systems in the United States, and likely in many other places, create and elevate much of the same. Some places are worse. Some places are better. The only only metric bad systems seem to point to is that they are apparently less shitty than even worse systems. Isn’t that a fine ideal to pass on posterity! Who wants to aspire to be “least shitty”?³

In short, I am going to believe my own lying eyes. What looks like bad leadership is almost certainly bad leadership. What looks like a ship without a rudder is probably exactly that. Organizations are ultimately reflections of their leadership. When you get the impression your boss’s only inspiration is looking at other companies and trying to make a quick and cheap imitation, you’re probably right.

I cannot think of a single time in my entire professional life that I have found myself thinking or saying, “This is a bad idea,” where I was pleasantly surprised as a result of things magically working out. The moment of satisfying smugness that comes with saying, “Told ya so,” is never worth the resulting damage—especially when dozens of told-ya-so’s never seem to give rational people any kind of credibility with people who are drunk on Ayn Rand and believe themselves to be our betters.

Now that the emergency response to my own life has played out—I lack the energy and the will to maintain both sides at once—a choice has to be made about here and now. That choice will also affect tomorrow. Without a plan and without real direction toward escape, I’ll cross the event horizon and be consumed by the other side. Gravity is too powerful when it is unopposed.

It’s time to admit to myself that I just cannot do this any longer. My brother was only 43 when he dropped dead. While middle age feels like I’m only halfway there, there’s absolutely no guarantee that’s the case. I’m old enough to really think about what the book that will be written will say. How will it conclude? How will I be remembered?

Do I want to be someone who knew it was all rotten and played along anyway because I was too afraid to do anything else? Is all the arrogance and bravado merely a cover for insecurity? Or do I have the wits and the will to live and work in a way that is truly congruent with my own values and moral code?

As I keep saying to co-workers and others as I talk about my professional life and the state of the software industry, “I just want to use my powers for good. That’s all.” Why is it so hard for skills and good to align? You can do good without being a saint. You can do it by running a business that’s honest. Hell, the bar is so low in software right now all you have to do is not abuse your paying customers. That’s how pathetic it’s become.

It’s time to figure out what doing good looks like in a way that keeps my family fed. It’s been done by others. I’m certainly not asking for anything impossible or even improbable. And maybe, just maybe, something can be built that can free more than only me from this crippling absurdity.

There is something better and dammit, it’s time to really get after it right now, not “next week.”

In my life, why do I smile
At people who I’d much rather
Kick in the eye?

I’ve had conversations related to the really hard moral view pieces like Fruit of the Poison Tree and More Than Output where individuals I know and love will apologize or express guilt for their complacency in what they also believe to be evil.

For my friends and perhaps also for those who would disagree with my moral stances, let me be clear: moral compromise is essential to make it through life. Most of us are nothing if not a collection of moral compromises. I understand this. I, unfortunately, do not live in perfect congruence with my own values. I make no claim I am free of hypocrisy. I don’t even believe such an existence is possible.

Life puts us on the horns of dilemma more than any of us who aren’t psychopaths would like. It puts us in the position of choosing lesser evils or doing things we’re not proud of. Sometimes the long term game we play forces us to consider that the ends may very well justify what appear to be unsavory or compromised means.

You cannot function in any present society without a lot of moral compromise. There’s too much evil to pick up a holy banner in every imaginable crusade. The powerful among our species dish out darkness, selfishness, inequity, cruelty, and destruction with unmitigated glee. The structures around us make us constantly choose and, in many cases, vote against our neighbors for the sake of self preservation—or sometimes just plain comfort or convenience.

When I was a young neoliberal libertarian borderline Christian nationalist of sorts¹ I was particularly oppressed by two flawed ideas:

• Systemic problems require individual solutions and that the onus of solutions to systemic problems rests on the entirely voluntary actions of individuals.
• That I could make sense of the moral dilemmas of my current time and place by relying on books, texts, and ideas that were forged sometimes thousands of years ago in cultures that are entirely alien to me and my time.

The first of these is particularly relevant and ultimately compounded in very weird ways by the second.

You cannot be a personal bulwark against every perceived evil out there. Maybe there is some sort of monastic lifestyle where this works, but if you want to operate in any heterogenous society, you will have to give up on moral purity. We’re left to pick and choose the moral positions that are our hills to die on and the ones that we lack the will or energy to resist.

If you pick too many hills, you’ll certainly be given the opportunity to die.

The individual responsibility angle that flooded my youth—and I mean through at least the entirety if my 20s—coupled with the religious implications of it all made everything feel like some kind of sin, and in a way far more personal than just the the general “we’re all sinners” sort of evil. Somewhere in the ether beyond the veil some bureaucrat in the hereafter was making a list and checking it twice. Every single action in my life was a moral quandary.

• How much money can I justify spending on myself?
• How much evil am I complicit in when shop at a supermarket or department store?
• What foreign laborers were harmed because I can only afford cheap goods?
• What environmental ruin is the result of my consumerism?

The list goes on. Trying to make sense of this within a religious framework sort of built on texts written thousands of years ago for cultures that are completely alien translated from languages I don’t understand and put through the ringer of thousands of years of reinterpretation by more alien cultures being preached to me by a modern religious corporation, was driving me mad. I was going absolutely mad.

It wasn’t until my early 40s that the level of madness and emotional destruction became clear. I still feel extreme guilt and shame for all kinds of things in my life that make no sense. Fail to stop for any given homeless person? Shame. Failure to properly disassemble garbage for proper recycling? Guilt. Buying literally any food in plastic? Yeah, total and complete madness.

I would argue the act of existing in a consumerist industrial society is impossible without even the most banal day-to-day activities creating harm. The generation and creation of energy is harmful. That’s the world many of us were born into. This harm is multiplied if you live in the US because you’re part of the empire that—even in its decay—still sits atop all of this and dictates global evils on a greater scale than any other nation.

Systemic problems require systemic solutions though. None of us can just leave it all behind for some uncharted place and live with the land like our ancestors could many millennia ago. That’s pretty much not an option for anyone who wants to anyway. Even if you did, isn’t leaving other members of your tribe behind to get away from it all itself a compromise?

It’s not moral compromise that disgusts me in most cases². You cannot escape them. It’s the cowardice of those who evade the question of whether or not they are making a compromise that create the fuel for evil to thrive. Understanding personal compromise is the gateway to identifying systemic problems you cannot conquer on your own. In democratic societies this forms the basis for action and legislation—systemic solutions.

Let me provide a dilemma that is very much a problem of our current times.

About 10 years ago I bought a used minivan shortly after my first son was born. I have been looking to upgrade this vehicle for the last couple years. The old girl has served us well, but it was bare bones, many little things like the power locks had just stopped working, and it was pushing 200K miles. It’s also the daily driver for my wife and kids. Safety features have evolved considerably since 2011 when the vehicle was manufactured.

The problem was, I wanted an EV. While I don’t buy into the terrible imagery that buying an EV is somehow me wrapping Mother Earth in a soft, green embrace, they’re a lesser evil³. Okay, so get an EV, right? Perfect, I’ll just go get the EV minivan that no one manufactures! I figured by now there would be an option, but not really. VW is sorta close but this is not a company I trust at all. When it comes to both reliability and generally choosing an auto manufacturer for my family, I’m never going to bet against the Japanese.

Do I need a minivan? Yeah, as someone doing normal things in an industrialized society, I do. My family tends to travel by our van, not by air. I have a house of musicians and one of them plays a double bass that I have to lug around with a full crew. They also play as a band and there’s a lot of equipment involved.

I weighed the options and compromised on a gas guzzler, even in 2026. I recognize said compromise. I recognize that I was unwilling to make the changes required to have an EV. The thing is, the trouble with emissions is a systemic problem. It’s not up to every single consumer to compromise to make this work. That’s not even a real solution. It’s libertarian nonsense making excuses for the fact that they hate even the idea of a “nanny state” or being forced to make anything but the most selfish choices at their disposal⁴.

We should have a much wider infrastructure for EVs now—among many, many other entirely attainable and affordable alternative energy solutions both in terms of production and consumption. Instead, the United States elected a president who uses the phrase “clean coal.” If you have ever seen or burned coal, you know that there is nothing clean about this. There are modern measures that reduce the impact of coal, but the simple reality is this: burning shit is not a sustainable future for energy production. Get the fuck over it.

As a result, just existing in any normal capacity creates environmental harm. Energy production has an environmental cost. Human expansion has an environmental cost. Consumerism has an environmental cost and typically also a human cost due to the current trend toward exploiting cheap labor in nations with little to no worker protections. Almost none of us living in the first world are going to agree to give up our refrigerators though. Even the seemingly responsible act of recycling is often just dumping that trash on poor foreign communities so you can feel good about yourself. These problems all require systemic solutions. In order to be part of the voting block to bring that about, you must be aware of your own impact, your own harms, and your own moral compromises.

I think the most frustrating thing about the time in which we live is that most of the particularly existential threats to our species and our environment are entirely solvable. We don’t need magical technological breakthroughs from a future that isn’t here yet. We have less than perfect options that will almost certainly get us there. Our leaders and power brokers that continue to consolidate the world’s wealth work actively against these things for reasons I cannot comprehend. Their children will be consumed along with the rest of us. They breathe the same air we breathe. There comes a point where even wealth and power can’t insulate nor save you.

Hunger can be solved, right fucking now. Housing can be solved, right fucking now. There is no reason anyone should have think about the personal economic impact of going to the ER. There is simply no need for war. There is no need for poverty. There is no need to marginalize others. There is no need for oppression. The cliché world painted by John Lennon in Imagine is right there for the taking with the tools, technology, and wealth we have at our disposal right here, right now. Instead, we get to live in the alternate reality he sung about in Working Class Hero⁵.

Why do we always choose the second song?

More often than not because avoid the recognition of our moral compromises rather than accepting them as the necessary evils that they are and considering whether we’re truly individually responsible or if the solutions require forces and organization greater than our own actions and social spheres.

You do not have to strive for perfect compliance with your own values. This world and this time regularly puts them in conflict with each other. Please though, do not feed the beast. Do not put your head in the sand and pretend the compromise does not exist purely because you’re not at fault. Do not pretend that your complacence in matters of morality—or worse, your avoidance of consideration—does not feed the worst of our species.

However, do not waste mental and emotional energy blaming yourself for the compromises necessary to exist with relative sanity. These are not your problems to solve alone. Conscious compromise is not an act of acceptance, it is more an act of basic survival.

Perhaps one day, things will be better.

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

It’s easy if you try.

A couple years later, at a startup where I had made my disgust for AI well known, a co-worker shared Nik Suresh’s excellent essay I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again and asked if I was the actual author. I was flattered, but no. I am not Ludic¹.

As good and validating as both of these pieces are, there is a person out there far more important and influential on my stance as absolutely anti-LLM and anti-generative AI. Let’s call this creature “Steve” because that’s his real name. Steve loves AI. He was (and in a sense still is, I suppose) a co-worker. My antagonism of his vapid points and ill-formed conclusions about pretty much anything he talked about were part of our early company culture.

It’s easy to call Steve an idiot because if you so much as moonlight as an intellectual—even if you’re not good at it—Steve most certainly checks all the boxes. He’s virtually incapable of contemplating depth on any subject and as such Twitter is his main source of information. He has no idea what hard work is. In fact, I don’t think he understands work at all, beyond delegation and taking credit for the fruits of said delegation at the expense of the delegates. If you approach work with any sense of honor or integrity, Steve embodies exactly the opposite of what you want.

This should have meant a competent founder at a cash-strapped startup would have immediately recognized dead weight for what it was as well as the toxicity a certified layabout brings to a small company of mostly very hard workers. Sadly, Steve was not the only individual in our organization lacking competency and so he not only stayed, he motherfucking thrived.

While it is certainly easy to call Steve and idiot, the way the startup played out and depending on the metric you use, Steve is a goddamn genius! The real chumps were the programmers and other team members putting in 12-16 hour days trying to keep their little startup alive. Another co-worker who loves pissing me off² would often say to me, “And you know he makes more than you,” when I would complain about all the time I was putting relative to this professional pudknocker.

The idea was so utterly absurd I dismissed it. A comment meant to enrage me was typically defusing because in no just universe—hell, even in the entirely unjust universe that we actually inhabit—could that be the case. It was too silly—so silly that I would just laugh about it. No one running a company would look at the output of Steve compared to me or even the lowest ranking member of the engineering team and think, “This fucking guy deserves C-level pay.”

When we were acquired by a larger company and equity positions as well as compensation were revealed to me, I would learn some things about Steve and about myself:

• I’m the fucking idiot.
• Steve is actually a genius.
• Life is not fair.
• Never, ever trust a CEO. Ever. They’re all fucking vipers.

This dude had been making a killing to the tune of a full 50% more than the company’s principal engineer. I should add that in my first in person conversation with the CEO he asked, “How do we clone you?” This is because my output is kind of insane³. I guarantee this question was never asked of Steve.

I don’t even want to talk about the equity because it was much worse.

When the developers became aware of this disturbance in the Force, many echoed my thoughts. “Huh. I always thought Steve was just a lazy moron. It sounds like we’re actually the fucking morons.”

Aside from the CEO, everyone on the team knew the guy did no work, phoned in everything he could, exploited those who reported to him, and used and abused unlimited PTO with impunity. The thing is, no one actually noticed when he was gone except that the constant barrage of non sequitur Twitter posts about AI and crypto ceased. In person he was nothing but a collection of stories about life hacks and platitudes. No depth. All Twitter. A man whose view of life is that it is a loophole to be abused while lesser people toil away dirtying their hands with work.

Again, if you think you could even pretend to be an intellectual, you’ll recognize this creature for what he is. What CEOs see in Steve, however, is a younger version of themselves. They see vision. They see potential. They see themselves because in reality, CEOs and grifters have a lot in common. They not only despise the act of labor but they despite compensating labor. Instead, they elevate and compensate fellow parasites who suck the very blood of makers and doers. They are the abominations for whom neoliberalism was designed.

This might surprise you, but this is not really about Steve aside from the fact that he represents a very specific and very real sort of archetype in business. I’ll bet many of you recognize the many Steves you’ve worked with in your life. Steve could be your manager. He could even be your CEO. If you’re what the leadership calls a “worker bee” then you probably fucking hate these people and would not be sad to see them fed to lions in the Coliseum for your entertainment⁴.

People like Steve actually do serve an important purpose if you know what to look for. In a sense, if you can stomach listening to any of the word salad they pass off as conversation they are the canaries in the coal mine. While academics and intellectuals study and measure and consider things, people like Steve have a sort of uncanny ability to identify and advocate for the very worst ideas possible at the moment of their inception. They don’t need to wait and see. They don’t need to think. They can piece together the code words used by other grifters and smell the sweet, sweet aroma of exploitation from miles away. This is misidentified by other grifters and self-styled “entrepreneurs” as a “go getter” attitude and is rewarded as such.

For me, Steve was the clearest sign that LLMs were a fucking joke compared to their hype. In 2022, I didn’t really know a ton about LLMs, but I knew ChatGPT had to be something horrible because Steve absolutely loved it and could not shut the fuck up about it. Steve also loves crypto. If you don’t have the time to educate yourself on the depth of bad ideas, just find the Steve in your life and use them as a barometer for the very worst decisions for your business.

This fucking guy could not get through a meeting without saying, “Maybe we can use AI.” That was the only “contribution” he had—and even writing that is a complete abuse of the word. You can, of course, see why this guy was making C-level money and C-level equity while also being the least useful and least productive member of the team. Post acquisition he, of course, charms the Product department and continues to ascend.

Steve is the person for whom AI is especially appealing. When you don’t know anything about anything, everything spewed forth from LLMs looks like brilliance. When you struggle forming basic thoughts, ChatGPT does indeed look like an army of PhDs bundled into a godlike technical edifice. When you hate work but want to get paid, generative AI is your meal ticket. When you’re not intelligent, educated, or skilled you lack the ability to know when your messiah is hallucinating. The inability to notice turns out to be no problem at all when the grifters you surround yourself with live in a wicked and hellish echo chamber that somehow controls the power and capital.

I have often said that a person’s actual abilities in a given discipline are inverse to their enthusiasm for AI. The Steves of the world bear this out pretty well.

He’s still making bank though! So good for him, right? Do you study? Do you work hard? Do you approach life with a sense of honor? Joke’s on us you gullible dipshit!

For those of us who have sided with the faction that has decided that the fundamental underpinnings of LLMs, generative AI, and the companies promoting it are absolutely, positively evil and a fucking blight on our species, it’s really not even worth it to trouble ourselves with caring about the technological merits—presuming there really are any—at all.

For example, if there was a machine or a system out there that made me twice as productive at work and all I had to do was beat one of my kids once a week to invoke its power, I’m just not going to use it. I’m not going to tame it. I’m not going to entertain it. I’m not going to set up “guardrails” or “harnesses” or “agents” or “Ralph loops.” In fact, I’m not even going to take a co-worker particularly seriously if they want to talk about using it. Obviously, if I have a boss trying to force me to use it, it’s obvious to anyone with any sense of morality that this boss is a piece of shit¹.

If you think this is hyperbole, you are wrong. If you think of LLMs and generative AI only in terms of outputs, you are either utterly ignorant, delusional, or a psychopath. None of these are mutually exclusive either. You can totally be all three and, sadly, these people do exist in greater quantity than I imagined.

Baldur Bjarnason expressed his disappointment, in regard to fellow programmers in one of his more recent takes on the topic. Many of us who have taken up this position and this banner have done so because of the rot within this technology and the corporations developing and selling it. The looming short and long term consequences are dire. We recognize that. We oppose that.

Those who adopt the “don’t worry they will figure it out” align themselves with the villains in this act. That is how it works. Taking the position of “I only worry about the technology and don’t care about being philosophical” is entirely spineless. When you really dig in, how can you justify avoiding the ethical quandaries?

People take this position for the same reason I don’t want to know about the preferences of programmers I respect. Ignorance is bliss. When Chris McCord, for instance, started endorsing this stuff, it was downright sickening to me. If I don’t know, I don’t have to feel bad or guilty. I can just pretend everything is fine. I don’t have to deal with conflicting emotions and I don’t want to if I can avoid it because no one does.

As I was winding down from a work day and checking YouTube for something to listen to while making a very late lunch, this video from ThePrimeagen involving an essay written by DHH popped up in my feed.

My first instinct was to not click. I could tell pretty quickly from the preview material I was not going to like the content at all. Worse, after watching, I was even more disgusted than I thought I would be. I was mad at DHH for his terrible take. This one really bothers me because I tend to really like what the guy has to say². I think of all the programmers who have inspired me throughout my career, DHH would be near the top if not the top.

As if that weren’t bad enough, I felt ThePrimeagen’s takes were not too much better, despite his defense of some of the projects DHH took to task. While I get what he was trying to say, the conclusion left a terrible taste in my mouth. Perhaps less about any individual but rather an indictment of the ridiculous time we live in:

Maybe it’s good to have skills.

Maybe? Am I supposed to feel some sense of shame to agree? Am I some kind of “luddite” for thinking skills matter?

Are y’all fucking for real?

Where DHH is Wrong

Where isn’t DHH wrong here? Mr. Hanson, like many others, has bought into the insane idea that agentic development through LLMS is the next step in the evolution of our field. It is not. He’s fallen into many of the terrible mental traps that accompany this false assumption.

I was originally going to focus on what I thought were the most egregious parts and deal with them one at a time. The trouble is, he’s just wrong. The premise and arguments from start to finish are painfully and embarrassingly wrong. I have to address most of it because someone is wrong on the internet.

Let’s start with his first sentence, which is as misleading as it is an entirely false premise. This does not bode well at all for the rest of the essay:

The open source movement spent decades fighting for everyone’s right to change software, through free access to code and permissive licenses to release improvements.

Not everyone who releases their source code is philosophically aligned with or in any way bound to “The Open Source Definition.”

Conflating all open source (little os) projects with the Open Source Movement (big OS) is preposterous. There are plenty of open source projects out there with a myriad of motivations for making their code available. It covers everything from copyleft zealotry³ to “I wanted a repo but didn’t want to pay for GitHub and don’t really care.” That’s a pretty massive spectrum.

When someone puts in the time and effort to make their code available, especially in the “free as in beer” model, I have a real problem with pretty much anyone telling them what they have to do with their projects or how they should manage them. Is someone providing free stuff supposed to do something beyond that? Seriously? Do they somehow owe me more?

No good deed shall go unpunished I guess.

See, all programmers are equal, but some programmers are more equal than others.

No, they are not. This is a skill. I don’t even understand this position.

What are you even saying here my guy? Who is fucking saying all programmers are equal?

I’m sorry, the premise here is so terribly silly I can’t even. This is not a statement that should be taken seriously. (And yet, here I am.) I was going to write an analogy involving a bunch of other skilled disciplines before I realized this is not a serious argument in this universe and deserves no further refutation than I refute it thus!⁴

Projects big and small have been erecting new participation barriers on contributions aided by AI to preserve the privileges of the old programmer guilds.

No. Maintainers of their own repositories are laying down policies for how their fucking projects are managed. Repositories have owners. Open source repositories are not, in fact, any sort of public property by right of existing.

The beauty of open source is I can take some code and learn from it and modify it in the comfort of my own office. I can do so with the code of all the linked projects. If I am using that code and want to make modifications as it relates to my project I can also do that. The original repo, however, does not belong to me. If it did, things like the license wouldn’t apply. I can fork it in almost all cases. The maintainer, however, owes me absolutely nothing and does not have to take my changes if I submit them.

Maintainers who have already lent their time and talent to our community and profession get to control the destiny of their fucking repositories. I don’t want those “democratized.” I don’t want someone telling me what I have to include in my goddamn work, David. No one is stopping you from vibing away on an existing open source project either. The code is right fucking there.

SQLite is open source but certainly doesn’t let just anyone contribute and never has. Their maintainers have very specific ideals and goals for their project, as is their right. Humanity as a whole has benefited from this. Not every project needs, wants, or is improved by vibing randos or even a widespread community.

One size does not fit all. There’s a reason most of us don’t have positive reactions to “design by committee.”

Humans have been writing shitty software, with dodgy attribution and plenty of bugs, since five minutes after the profession materialized.

I’m so tired of this—so tired of this. Again, consider any other skilled discipline with this take. I dunno, how about doctors or lawyers settling for garbage because so much has preceded them? It’s lazy. It’s harmful. It’s disgusting.

In fact, I think this attitude is so pervasive in our industry because the software industry is, indeed, very bad at software. When are we going to adopt skill and discipline like actual engineers (think people who design bridges) or even tradespeople (think plumbers) rather than accepting irresponsible work?

Do you want to just believe that the casual acceptance of poor to mediocre work is a baked in feature of this discipline? Is that what I should teach my son when he starts down this path?

Our industry has the capacity to cause harm. Not every software project is some fun chat app with no consequences. Sometimes it powers very serious and very important things. It deserves serious professionals.

Programming is evolving. We don’t know exactly what the final shape will look like, but giving more people access to the fruits of computing freedoms is worth resisting the temptation to close the gates of participation.

While I agree with this in principle—I’ve made it clear how much I fucking hate low level programming in the past and am glad for high level languages and frameworks and libraries and syntax highlighting and all that—AI generated code is not that.

AI generated code cannot even exist without the massive and long term efforts of skilled people who have been giving away and making their code available. Those people have an absolute right to say no.

Again, no one is stopping a prompt fondler from vibing away on any given piece of software. It’s open. It’s free. Have at it.

Finally, let’s stop talking about about “freedoms” somehow being enhanced and anything being “democratized” by technologies that are inherently oppressive and anti-democratic. Techno-fascism is specifically anti-freedom and anti-democracy.

Where ThePrimeagen is Wrong⁵

ThePrimeagen is trying to take the “middle ground” here. The ever agnostic “you do you and I’ll do me” or “it’s just a tool” camp. He says pretty clearly that he doesn’t understand people like me—people in the AI is Most Definitely Fucking Evil camp⁶. It’s clear he doesn’t get it—or at least really consider it—beyond the technology aspect. This is a real problem across the industry.

Not only does he sorta waffle on NetBSD’s rationale but he actually calls out jqwik while failing to point out that the maintainer, Johannes Link, has written rather extensively on why he too is in the AI is Evil camp. His essay on the topic reads almost like a condensed version of The Intelligence Illusion. It is well sourced and I highly recommend. It has far more substance than either DHH or ThePrimeagen in this context.

There was one brilliant paragraph in the introduction that I think really puts into context what many of us in the AI is Evil camp understand:

The crux of the matter is that ethical behaviour does not come for free. Ethics are neither efficient nor do they enhance your economic profit. That means that by acting according to your values you will, at some point, have to give something up. If you’re not willing to do that, you don’t have values—just opinions.

ThePrimeagen specifically calls us out saying:

You put your values on other people.

No, I don’t. I am allowed within my own domain and within projects I maintain to set the values I expect to be followed by those I allow to participate. If we can have Codes of Conduct that often appeal heavily to identity politics in every fucking repo out there, I sure as shit have the right to say I don’t want code generated with fascist propaganda machines⁷ in my goddamn codebases. It’s bad enough that the very act of open-sourcing my code feeds these beasts.

Regardless, I’m not putting anything on anyone. I’m not storming into anyone’s office and tasering them if I see Claude or Cursor open on their computer. I can have a poor opinion of these people though and they can think the same about me. They can call me a luddite. Fine. Life goes on.

Having said all that, a portion of his conclusion is really good. He leaves the pure tech sphere and talks about his connection with projects and its importance. That matters. That matters even more when you’re invested in or maintaining a project for a long time.

Tools, Technology, and Outputs

It is disingenuous to consider LLMs and generative AI purely in terms of their technological merit while ignoring their social, economic, and environmental impacts. Even if you ignore the moral and ethical issues—and again, you’re kind of a shitbird if you do—the economic realities should still measure into the supposedly objective calculus. This is especially important in regard to the insane position taken by DHH.

LLMs and the entire generative AI industry are subsidized. Tools that appear cheap and available to everyone are not going to continue to exist in this fashion. They cannot. At some point the piper must be paid.

How empowering or “democratizing” is this technology when:

1. People have to pay the actual cost of the tool?
2. The output of the tool is built on the theft of those who do not consent to the use of their material being used to power these monsters?

How these tools are used will change fundamentally when we have to pay the actual costs. Thankfully, most of these idiotic debates will simply die. When we have to judge the outputs with an actual ROI and a cost per use, a lot of people are going to very quickly change their tune about the value of agentic anything.

And the justifications are just as tired: It’s about quality! It’s about attribution! It’s about workers! Spare me. It’s about you, your insecurities, and your privileges.

David. David. My dude. Are you really taking the position that quality, attribution (and the related copyrights), and workers aren’t really important? Seriously, spare me. It’s about you, your insecurities, and your privileges.

Making an accusation like that about Johannes Link when he’s taken a very clear ethical stand is absolute and utter horse shit⁸. You just want to keep playing with your fancy little toys and you don’t want anyone to tell you it’s wrong. You don’t want to feel guilty. You don’t want to have to be burdened with the ethical and moral implications of your usage because you like it.

Well guess what buddy? It’s fucking wrong. The outputs be damned. The code be damned. All of it be damned because this whole fucking thing is gonna split and sink like the Titanic⁹. At that point you and your ilk will have to admit that you have been duped by this scam and have wasted god knows how many precious hours training your slop. You will have to consider your part in what’s been done to the current generation of programmers and the businesses and projects that have been afflicted by it. Programmers of renown, as opposed to jackasses like me, are among the must culpable for endorsing this madness.

Are these tools here to stay? While some speak as if it is inevitable, I simply do not agree.

The economics will be the first reality that comes crashing down for sure. It has not been demonstrated these industries can operate in a sustainable manner, period. It’s not granted that they will either.

Once the social psychosis wears off—and we’re already seeing this all over the place, the fact that ThePrimeagen is saying things like “I’ve come out the other side” tells you what we all think about this even when we don’t want to admit it—we’re gonna see if this was at all valuable. Maybe, just maybe, we also ask the question as cultures and nations, “Was the output worth the cost? Just because can, does it mean we should?”

When (hopefully) saner governments get involved and actual regulations come into play, how is that going to affect both the sustainability and the cost?

Also, where is the power going to come from? David, do you want a gas turbine polluting and powering one of the these data centers in your home town? I mean, if we’re gonna talk about “democratizing” anything, we should stop dumping the burden of these data center projects on small towns and poor communities where their government officials are selling out their water and power rights. Some communities, I guess, are more equal than others.

LLMs rely on the skill of humans to generate anything remotely useful. They cannot move forward without us moving forward. The skill atrophy and the “democratization” of utter fucking trash is adding more and more burden to the very skill players who are the most important fuel for these demonic engines¹⁰. How does this cycle actually play out long term? What happens when more slop is the training data?

Do you really think software is going to improve with these tools? Are the maintainers going to improve? This is all predicated on the belief that LLMs can only get better and better. I believe they have peaked and we’re going to feel the pain of diminishing returns. More hilariously, many of the tools that improve code generation from a couple years ago to now are less about the models and more about the regular old deterministic code that helps try to reduce the insanity.

If your faith in the “AI revolution” is based on the notion that this is just the beginning and that it will only improve, it is a vain faith.

But hey, who cares what I think? We can all compare notes after the bubble pops and the realities are laid bare. These problems have a way of sorting themselves out—sometimes in the form of the weakest and most vulnerable members of society being robbed and steamrolled while we debate over the merit of code generation.

Please though, don’t let me burden you with details like ethics. I mean, it’s not like DHH’s piece was trying to take an ethical… oh wait.

Bro, seriously? What the fuck?

Ask yourself, honestly, do you have values? Or just opinions?

I’ve changed up the way I handle commits just a little bit as of late in response to a sort of… problem I have.

I don’t believe in any particular PR¹ size. I just don’t. Some places have policies about it which, in my experience, lean on small PRs because they’re “easier to review” or “easier to revert.” To me, these concerns are entirely secondary. I do not like committing half-baked, half-assed, or half anything to a codebase.

Some features lend themselves to nice, neat little additions. That’s fine. That’s a nice easy review. These are typically iterative additions to an existing data model or at least semi-mature part of a system. One or two commits for 50-100 lines do not require a ton of process. Just follow a decent convention and remember why you commit and all will be right in the world.

The trouble comes when you have a very big PR. As a lead who is generally banging out core functionality on systems I work on, I have the luxury—and it is indeed luxurious—of building a lot of new stuff. At times I am adding some major new piece of functionality or a foundational data model (sometimes many) to the system and I honestly cannot stand piecemealing that sort of thing over multiple PRs.

A major feature should be reviewed with full context, entirely together. Moreover, when you treat all code like a liability—because it fucking is—you get into the habit of avoiding adding things that are incomplete to a codebase. There have been times where the childlike whims of an executive have caused the abortion of a feature I’ve already put a week into. Sure, I don’t get all the delicious the metrics of committing something that never worked and then reverting it² but better to the dustbin than in and out of production.

The problem with this approach is when co-workers see a +3,000 line PR, they do not necessarily want to review it because it’s like, “Oh yeah, I have a whole day to spend on that.” (I do have an engineer on my team who is godlike in this regard. If anyone I know is reading, they know who I speak of!) Again, as a team lead I have the luxury of basically forcing people to do my bidding and, of course, my team just loves learning at the feet of the master³ but seriously… ain’t nobody got time for that! (Actually, you ain’t got time not to do it, but that’s another story entirely.)

In recent history I have modified my approach to commits specifically around this problem and, while it’s certainly nothing groundbreaking and I doubt I’m even remotely the first person to do this, I was pleased enough with the results to write about it and continue using it. This is in direct response to some soft criticism from my own team. (I know y’all pad your comments with “lol” but… I know. I know.)

I’ll talk about my general approach to putting together a PR and then the sort of philosophical shift I’ve made as of late.

Terminal git

I need to take a moment, before I go on, to address a sort of elephant in the room. If you’re not using some kind of decent GUI program for interacting with git, you’re almost certainly not very good with git and your git log is mediocre at best, short of being some kind of savant.

To really use git well, in my opinion, you need to git gud with rebasing or, at a minimum, wait until the end to commit anything. Rebasing—specifically interactive rebasing—is, as I like to say, the tits. (If you don’t know, I invite you to fire up your favorite search engine and educate yourself.)

When working on large scale PRs, it also makes a lot of sense to commit some files in chunks. If this is somehow trivial from the command line, great. You’re a savant. Have at it. Don’t pretend that most of your co-workers are also bonkers.

The PR Process

I commit at three different points, and one of them is temporary:

1. When an entire feature is complete, tests are written, and documentation is done.
2. When a part of a feature is complete enough to do the above.
3. When I want to flag a bunch of code as a work in progress and push my branch to the remote repo because it’s Friday and in case I die or get fired for refusing to prompt fondle Claude, my work is preserved somewhere. This is the temporary one.

Committing is the third major review of code for me. The first and second are documentation and testing. These can be separate or go together and the order doesn’t matter. Sometimes documentation even precedes code. It’s mostly dictated by a combination of mood, feature particulars, and how much groundwork was done before the coding started.

Either way, by the time I’m committing, things appear to work and I have explained myself in the codebase so future generations can see how delusional I am. It’s working. Now… let’s start committing.

This is where the GUI is nice. It can be built into your IDE or text editor or whatever. As long as you can see diffs clearly, review them, and then commit them by chunks rather than whole files, you’re good.⁴ Seriously though, stop relying on your terminal for commits and actually look at your diffs!

At this point I start committing logical groups of things that I can either write a decent commit message about or that don’t require one. In many cases the documentation that’s part of the committed code tells the story and you don’t need summarize it even more in the commit message. If it’s not, or historical color is needed, have at it. I don’t do more for the sake of more.⁵

If you ever look over my commit log you’ll often see a metric ton of code committed in like a 20-30 minute span. This is me going through this process. I will amend and rebase and sometimes even reorder commits to make the story of the process clearer. If you’re using a decent GUI with a good interactive rebase process, this is trivial.

At the end, each commit really stands on its own and has been explained as much is needed for historical purposes. Even a monster PR is broken up into digestible chunks. It’s also given me pause to review all my own code, docs, and tests. Quite often this is where I’ll catch a number of small issues, missing docs, etc.

Does this take time? Yes.

Is the final product better? Yes.

Is it worth it? Yes.⁶

The Latest Tweak

The process above naturally lends itself to PRs that are relatively easy to review regardless of their size. Even the dumpster fire that is the current state of Github has a very usable commit-by-commit view for reviewing PRs.

All that has changed is that I think about three things very specifically in the context of reviewers:

1. The commit messages are very specifically about guiding a reviewer and explaining why something was done. This is already a good practice but I’ve found that thinking very specifically in terms of a review has really improved the quality and general usefulness if what I put in there. Asking myself, “What would someone doing a review need to know that isn’t obvious or implied by the code in the commit?” leads to very natural and useful messages. (Suck that Copilot!) In a total PR they can tell a story, which is handy.
2. This is harder to quantify specifically, but I tend to break up the PRs a little more. Sometimes I’ll just include a utility function or something in the PR where its functionality is being used, but when I really think about a review, I don’t. Again, this might already be the good practice of some of y’all out there, but I’ve found that thinking specifically about the review makes me more mindful of this sort of thing.
3. Commit order. Sometimes I’ll get my PR ready and just look over the commits and move stuff that’s supportive or even incidental to the front or back of the PR. (I like to make little fixes to unrelated code if I notice issues as I go. Going through an entire CI process⁷ for a typo fix is complete madness.) This keeps the feature bits in order.

This is more than “nice to have” and it still translates well to smaller PRs. After all, the true value of the commit log once code has shipped is your ability to understand changes in as much isolation as is sensible when trying to figure out where things went wrong. Not only does this improve the review process significantly, but it lends itself very naturally to this process.

I believe most programmers would benefit from a process like this over all. Of course, pretty much any time you turn some autopilot process into something mindful, the end result is better.⁸

I haven’t bothered looking, but I doubt I’m the first to say any of this. Think of this as my personal observation on the process as a sort general internet +1.

Exactly what code do you work on that isn’t important?

I ask because I still far too many comments like this:

• “Well, of course I don’t let AI code the important stuff.”
• “Oh, I always review everything, especially the important stuff.”
• “AI is great for handling all the boring (i.e. unimportant) stuff.”

That sounds great! What’s unimportant? Seriously.

If you’re executing code on your local machine, what part isn’t important? With your family photos, private documents, bank info, credentials, and all other manner of personal data hanging out on your computer, is there anything that’s unimportant? What about on your smart phone? I’m sure there’s nothing important there.

If you work on a SaaS system where you store customer data or are paid for a service, is there anything that’s unimportant?

Is there some kind of code that:

• Doesn’t pose a security risk?
• Can’t leak data to a client?
• Can’t destroy data it works with?

Even something like CSS can make a product unusable.

All code that is part of a system or executable on any machine with important data is important.

Yes, All of It

In the main codebase I currently maintain there is a core factory module that produces data for our test cases. A couple years ago I had to add a chunk of documentation to it that was basically a rant saying, all code is real code and all code is important. That includes factories and test cases. This was written after I torched a Friday evening cleaning up a ton of test cases and refactoring a bunch of copy pasta in to reusable factories.¹

Senior members of my team were the worst offenders (why is this so often the case?). They were in too much of a hurry to do the right thing which saved them time in the immediate term but, as is tradition, it cost me time. It’s been many, many years since I wasn’t the most valuable member of my teams. One of the main reasons isn’t any sort of wizardry either. It’s a willingness to do exactly this sort of unimportant grunt work.

Except it is important. It’s very important.

I care about the correctness and flexibility of a project. I care about this much more than “just getting it done” or even about a given feature. I don’t even care about deadlines most of the time because they’re a joke. And besides, deadlines include all of the important work. This is why teams I work on understand that sometimes I’m gonna go off script and spend a couples days refactoring a dump heap that has more and more trash piled on top.

Work like this—work that makes it easier to write tests and produce reliable state—means more tests get written. It means when a time crunch comes or a bug is found, testing is easier. This is exactly the stuff I think of as technical investment and it is important for the health of a codebase and a system. It’s extremely important.

Are we just now noticing?

The whole AI code thing must be one hell of a drug.² Seeing people who were or are otherwise rational go down this rabbit hole really has me thinking that drugs are the right analogy. More than one co-worker has described it as such to me. Is there really safe or responsible use of heroine?

Do you really want to engage with technology that is being being made intentionally addictive? (Just get off social media. Please)

Mo Bitar’s video is strange to me in many ways. I’ve seen and read others say some similar stuff and I just don’t get this awakening.

Is it ethical to pass this on to customers? No.

Is it safe? No.

Is it good work? No.

Can we really vouch for it or that we understand it? No.

This isn’t new. These are the questions and conundrums we should have had well before AI started shitting all over everything.

We’re already many, many layers deep as it is as programmers. We’re using compilers and libraries and system calls and all sorts of things we have to trust does what it says it does. We have to trust that at least someone has reviewed and taken some degree of responsibility for it.

Closed source vibe coded (or agentic, it’s just another word for the same shit) SaaS sounds like a recipe for disaster.

The Trifecta

Corporate Leaders Are Greedy Fucks

Corporate leaders have become particularly hostile even to their customers in recent years. I’m not saying there was a golden age per se, but this has been getting progressively worse in the last fifteen plus years. They don’t care. As long as they can get a lawyer on their team to convince them that they aren’t liable or that it doesn’t really matter because no one will fight it, ship it!

Programming is a Trash Trade

Software engineering is a shit discipline because there’s very little discipline involved. This is in part because of the aforementioned corporate leaders but… this is an industry that’s often more obsessed with the tools of the trade than the actual trade. Perhaps the nature of automation disproportionately imbues us with dispositions leaning toward avoiding work. I don’t have a clear answer, but anyone with more than a year of experience in software industry knows this.

Responsibility Isn’t Part of the Trade

Finally, there’s very little responsibility in software—not for the programmers themselves and certainly not for most of the companies. This is a huge problem.

Data security is a joke. If you’re giving your codebase to Anthropic or OpenAI and you’re allowing agents to run on developer machines, you are a joke. Full stop. You do not take security seriously.

The penalties for breeches or violations of law are typically not enough to scare the most egregious offenders.

The penalty for bringing down half the internet, costing hundreds of companies millions of dollars, is writing a postmortem blog post.

People make mistakes. It happens. Disciplined process is there to reduce those mistakes. This is, unfortunately at odds with hockey stick obsessed corporate leaders, monkeys chasing metric bananas, and “engineers” who are more interested in the current development fashion than in understanding the core of their trade or the business domains they touch.

Code is important people! We’re entrusted with sensitive data and critical tasks. Maybe keep that in mind when you work.

I keep thinking programmers need a fucking union but do we deserve one? Do we deserve to be taken seriously when we don’t really take our own trade seriously? While it doesn’t apply to all individuals, I’m starting to feel like our industry deserves this right now because as a whole, we suck.

I’ve had Jamiroquai’s Virtual Insanity on repeat a lot lately.

It is a wonder man can eat at all
When things are big that should be small
Who can tell what magic spells we’ll be doin’ for us?
And I’m givin’ all my love to this world, only to be told
I can’t see, I can’t breathe, no more will we be
And nothing’s going to change the way we live
‘Cause we can always take, but never give
And now that things are changin’ for the worse, see
Woah, it’s a crazy world we’re livin’ in
And I just can’t see that half of us immersed in sin
Is all we have to give these

Futures made of virtual insanity
Now, always seem to be governed by this love we have
For useless twisting of our new technology
Oh, now there is no sound, for we all live underground

Useless twisting of our new technology… yeah, that about sums it up.

There is nothing worse than a foolish man.

Virtual insanity is what we’re living in.

Isn’t it disturbing that this reads like a horoscope for many, many people in this field? “Hey! He’s describing my workplace too!” I wish my existence was the exception, believe me. Also, why this? We didn’t get Star Trek, fine. But fuck me, we don’t even get Bladerunner or Rollerball, both of which seem like an improvement. If I have to adopt a hideous future can it have pleasure units, flying cars, and unbridled hedonism for the common person at least?

This came to at least some sort of apex yesterday when I approached a senior executive with my concerns about AI’s usage in our company, its dangers, and I felt the supposedly “open” group discussions on the matter had taken a religious tone. Not only was I raised religious, but I’ve also once worked as a programmer for an MLM—errr, network marketing company/cult. I know the rhetoric. I know the tactics. I know the guilt and the shaming and the groupthink and the pressure to conform and the… bullshit.

In no uncertain terms, I was threatened by this individual as he wondered aloud whether the goals of an individual like myself were consistent with company goals. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on what you value in life, the message did not deter my feelings nor position on the matter. Doing the right thing is what matters. I have no intention of compromising the quality my work nor the security of our customers even if the company somehow thinks that’s what it wants.²

This discussion also lead into the immediate distaste of being asked how we would measure things, be it what is “foundational” or what is “successful.” My mind always goes back to the same question when some executive pinhead wants me to put some utterly meaningless value on doing something correctly.

What is the ROI for not shitting in your own bed?

Seriously, imagine if a tradesperson like a plumber or an electrician had to justify to their boss the value proposition for following building codes and using materials that were within specified tolerances. This isn’t a question of ROI. This is a question of doing your fucking job. Unfortunately, it seems that tech companies do not take themselves, nor their customers, very seriously. Despite being entrusted with sensitive data and vital operations, social media companies somehow set the standard and FOMO becomes the single most powerful force in decision-making.

Oh goody.

Seriously, why can’t it just be fucking Blade Runner?

Lies, Damn Lies, and…

Speaking of movies, I love Moneyball, right down to its portrayal of Billy Bean’s own superstition that watching a game had any effect on its outcome. If you’re a superstitious fan like I am, you probably understand this. (I feel like there’s a lesson in here somewhere. I leave it for you to unravel.) With that said, it’s important to remember that “based on a true story” leaves a whole lot of room for many parts to be entirely fictional and in no way connected with reality where it hurts the narrative. This is still a movie and its goal is entertainment, not accuracy.

Regardless, if you hang around in sports circles at all or talk to internet folks on fan boards, they will throw out the term “Moneyball” all over the place like they’re now experts on team building. They’ll sign up for the premium package with Pro Football Focus and correlate the success of their fantasy football team to how well they would be able to handle the position of a real general manager.

To put in perspective how completely and utterly insane this can become, the most devout believe in the numbers beyond what they see with their own eyes. This resulted in enduring two years of a couple people spamming my favorite fan site telling all of us how Zach Wilson was untapped potential and was an amazing quarterback.

If you’re not familiar, lemme save you the trouble. Zach Wilson is a bad NFL quarterback. That’s it. You do not want him as the starter for your team. If he is, you’re fucked. There’s a reason he hasn’t started a game since the 2023 season. To add insult to injury, the Jets dumped Sam Darnold for Zach Wilson. Mr. Darnold just completed the 2025 season as the starting quarterback for the Seattle Seahawks who just won the Super Bowl. While Darnold didn’t carry the team, he’s good enough!

Back to Wilson, or more specifically, his collection of fanatics and defenders. They compiled stat after stat from his college career, drew parallels with super star quarterbacks wherever they could, and cherry-picked every NFL stat imaginable that was telling the “real” story and how literally everything else on the team was letting him down.³ The thing about these guys is they really believed. They had bought into the religion of measurement and The One True Collection of Important Metrics™ so hard that no matter how bad Wilson wet the bed, that wasn’t going to deter them. No way. We’d all see soon enough! Numbers don’t lie!

Things went off the rails when Mike White—a guy so good he was riding the pine behind Wilson—had a hall of fame worthy game in his first start taking over for Wilson after an injury. Guess who went to town right after this trying to make sense of an anomaly? We had ourselves a good old metrics war for the best QB of two obviously shit quarterbacks.⁴ Football is already a completely miserable past time if you cheer for the Jets. This did not help.

And Statistics

Mark Twain popularized the adage that there’s “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” I would add the corollary there’s “lies, damned lies, and metrics.” Charles Goodhart would likely agree. Moreover, where statistics are used to cover for weak arguments, metrics and measurement can become a tool of replacing critical thinking with cheap comparisons on a spreadsheet. It also becomes a pitiful way to stymie concern and criticism by asking for the numbers or even more existentially, “Well, how do you actually measure that?”

Bad news, sometimes you don’t. Often times you can’t. While in some existential sense there is (maybe) a deterministic (or at least mostly deterministic) mathematical explanation for everything that could be used as both a predictor as well as a quantifier for everything, are you really going to argue we always have the tools or even the understanding of the interactions of variables to engage with a problem like that? This requires a high degree of confidence in your own ignorance or a low degree of intelligence. Either that or the arrogance of physicists who think they’ve rendered philosophy pointless.⁵

The more complex the system and the more vague the desired outcome, the more useless metrics become for both prediction and meaningful measurement.

This is not to say you shouldn’t ever measure or that said measurements cannot help inform decisions. The realization of the inherent incompleteness in numbers and that their place in making decisions is entirely subjective in spite of their own objectivity is essential to working with these tools instead of becoming and unwitting evangelist.

Don’t Be a Pinhead

Football is a very complex and very dynamic sport. Having said that, even though the rule book is thicker than the Bible at this point, it’s still a sport and is still governed by rules. It is by its nature significantly more measurable than some random ass software company or pretty much any medium sized corporation whose goals and rules of engagement and focus can change with the wind. (I refer back to our semi-annual re-org.)

At its highest level, it’s a multibillion dollar industry where each franchise is operated by billionaires who—even when their team has been complete garbage for 15 years—basically just print money with it. Owners can afford the best of the best of the best for virtually any position they want. Like other sports, football is seeing more metrics and statistical analysis become a part of the draft and in game process of many franchises.

Does it work? Is it any good? Probably? Sorta? It depends on the application and the franchise. I can tell you for certain that more metrics have not helped the Jets rise above the popularity generated by the Butt Fumble⁶ in 2012. Having the budget to hire more people to apply more numbers has not turned anything around. Hell, the Cincinnati Bengals—another franchise historically famous for making its fans hate football—are 114-111-3 since 2012, including multiple playoff appearances and a Super Bowl appearance. The Jets? 77-152 without sniffing the playoffs, let alone a Super Bowl.

Why mention the Bengals of all teams? Mike Brown, their owner, is notoriously cheap and has one of the most anemic scouting departments in the NFL. They are a bad franchise—a notably bad franchise. Without a commitment to metrics or numbers or even spending they’re still better than the Jets in pretty much every way that matters.

Woody Johnson, owner of the Jets, is a trust fund baby moron who knows very little about football. He represents the problem with the organization because the decisions flow through him. Bad organizations are ultimately reflections of bad leadership. The illusion of good process and the illusion of objectivity are no replacement for… good process and reasonable objectivity as part of that process. Of course, good process is also a deep understanding of wide subjectivity as well.

Dear leaders, at some point you need to take a step back from your worship of data and remember what p-hacking is and how easily numbers can be gamed by organizational nitwits. Ironically⁷, it’s the nitwits who will abuse this to their advantage more than anyone. The responsible and/or intelligent who genuinely care about their work and actual output will not because people like us recognize that these are not the same thing. We will also be exploited by said nitwits! The optimists among us will be very confused over and over again.

A numbers driven culture will produce mediocrity at best and abuse at its worst. Numbers need to be tempered with a greater overall philosophy and driving force.

A really good starting place is to understand when a question is rhetorical rather than in need of a measurement. For instance, if someone asks, “Should we stop shitting in our own bed?” Just say, “Yeah, we should. Do what must be done.” Don’t ask precisely how many turds in the bed constitute a real problem or if there are any features about said turds that need more precise measurement. Just insist that your organization stops shitting in the bed. That’s a really good start.

Zero Trust Sucks

I realize the shitting in the bed thing is very tongue-in-cheek, but not by as much as I’d like. I want to reinforce the idea that there are industry standards and practices that need to be taken as gospel (hopefully) before any metrics are even considered let alone measured. Building codes are not up for discussion in construction by the tradespeople. You either do them or an inspector tells you to redo it.

Software systems and development really need a heavy dose of this sort of standardization. Unfortunately, the industry is grotesque in its disdain for its own history. It suffers from a sort of industry version of “American Exceptionalism” and its leaders at the highest levels are among the most ignorant and arrogant out there.

There is this belief that tools, numbers, and automation will remove the need for any sort of wisdom or sober judgement. And believe me, given the complete lack of both wisdom and sober judgement, I wish we could rid ourselves of the need for it! If only wanting made it so.

Trust is one of the most important components of successful organizations. Do I have a formal study I can share on this matter? Nope. I’m making a pronouncement. I’m comfortable with that.

I believe the more an organization lacks trust in its own management system and individuals, the more it thirsts for so-called objectivity—and as stated this is, even in the best case, illusion.

Anyone who has worked on a team of 10 or 20 knows who produces, who is dependable, who is knowledgeable, and who is an asset. The individuals closest the books and making payroll are incentivized in a big way to understand this well. We rarely use metrics in small organizations because this is common knowledge.

Hell, in most small organizations I’ve worked in, the slapdicks know who they are. They rarely hang around in small companies because they know they need a place large enough and blind enough not to notice how they coast through their work day. In fact, what they look for are metrics obsessed organizations because nothing gives you cover for nothing like metrics! Figure out how to game the numbers and get coasting—especially if you can locate a top performer to commingle your output with.

As organizations grow, hierarchies need to grow. Layers need to trust layers—either that or your leaders decide layers are for chumps and that good management is mere bureaucracy and just do away with the idea entirely. Zero trust is no way to live nor is it a way to run an organization. Organizations are distinctly human and need to be treated as such.

We’re not computers. We’re not rational. We’re not just a collection of metrics. Attempts to approach us as such are inherently broken because it’s the wrong fucking paradigm you pinhead.

Put away your spreadsheets and maybe think about cultivating relationships with your management team. If you don’t trust your managers, guess what?

That’s on you… you fucking pinhead.

And Woody Johnson, if you’re reading this, I want you to know that you’re the patron saint of pinheads. St. Woodrow of Johnson, a guy with two names that are synonymous with “dick.”

The Jets suck. I wish they would stop sucking.

I also wish my job would stop sucking.