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It's a shame that the web moves 100 miles a minute. Steve Krouses's Vibe code is legacy code made quite the splash in the middle of the summer, but as it happens, I think it's one of those "yeah duh" posts that continues to look even more intelligent as time goes on.

We already have a phrase for code that nobody understands: legacy code.

Legacy code is universally despised, and for good reason. But why? You have the code, right? Can't you figure it out from there?

Wrong. Code that nobody understands is tech debt. It takes a lot of time to understand unfamiliar code enough to debug it, let alone introduce new features without also introducing bugs.

Programming is fundamentally theory building, not producing lines of code. We know this. This is why we make fun of business people who try to measure developer productivity in lines of code.

When you vibe code, you are incurring tech debt as fast as the LLM can spit it out. Which is why vibe coding is perfect for prototypes and throwaway projects: It's only legacy code if you have to maintain it!

I'm not 100% certain which order the ingredients were added to my soup, but I know this post put Programming as Theory Building by Peter Naur in the pot, right around the same time the Mythical Man-Month splashed it's way in, too. I have many thoughts, and No More Hog Butchering is the first ladel of piping hot goodness.

This piece about Cursor's culture will be one studied years from now. I switched to Cursor in June 2024 and haven't looked back (I'm even writing this post in Cursor). It's been clear to me that this is a generational company, and whatever they've been doing to ship at the velocity and quality they've achieved is special.

It reads like an ethnographic version of Valve's New Employee Handbook, and it's clear that Cursor's leadership has been very diligent about creating a culture that delivers on mission-vision-values rather than just talking about them. When Brie mention's the references that folks at Cursor use (deep Silicon Valley lore, etc), I imagine many people at the company actually have read Valve's handbook. Hiring Very Online People has it's perks, mainly that people have a greater understanding of what's possible, so they can pick and choose the best ideas for themselves.

Brie captures the essence perfectly, and just like her essay What I Miss About Working at Stripe (about the perils of Looks Good to Me culture), I'll be referencing ideas from Inside Cursor for years to come.

Earlier this year, I became acquainted with Fred Brooks's Mythical Man-Month, which is a canonical text in the SDLC world (that's software development lifecycle). For the last decade, I've been a rare champion of Agile methodologies. So it's weird that I'd never read the origin of those ideas.

Brooks worked at IBM for nine years, starting in 1956, and his crowning achievement was shipping the IBM System/360 family of computers. With that project under his belt, he went on to teach at Chapel Hill and write extensively about managing software projects, aiming to answer Thomas Watson Jr's question "Why are software projects so much harder to manage than hardware projects?"

Mythical Man-Month is a great text, and it's where Brooks's Law came to be:

"Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later"

MMM is worth a lot more ink than I can give it here, but the chapter titled "The Surgical Team" is particularly relevant to me, today, and to everyone building software for the years to come.

Some light house-keeping: I've started a new blog, and backfilled it with some posts from 2023 that are also archived on Substack. I will spare us all from the poetics about new blogs and just start writing.

God Judging Adam by William Blake, c. 1795

The phrase necessary evil gets thrown around a lot, usually referring to subjects that must be either. When in doubt, we could certainly go without. And dualism tells us that the bad contains the good, while the good contains the bad.

Instead, a necessary evil should be reframed as a coordination cost, where we are aware of the tradeoffs we're making in attempt to avoid a certain outcome. Typically, those outcomes are things like war, poverty, starvation...death, in other words.

To avoid them, humans have stumbled upon unique ways of coordination: churches and states and corporations that steer groups of people into more advantageous situations. The three bodies are the pillars of our world, and they often wage silent wars on the others in pursuit of supremacy.

There are two main tools they use: bureacracy and propaganda.

Bureaucracy helps a system maintain itself, ensuring that change happens at just the right pace. Within it, there is a hieracrchy, both implicit and explicit, that is representative of the competency of the system. Sometimes competency is raw ability to perform a task, but often the most competent person is the one who most effectively wields influence. Few understand that persuasion is the most important skill when it comes to coordination, and a lot of suffering follows.

Propaganda is the system imposing it's narrative on the surrounding ecosystem, including within the system itself. There is an inner game, where the system must tell stories to maintain the bureaucracy. Then there is an outer game, where the system tells stories in attempt to shape the ecosystem to it's advantage. Again, the ability to persuade is the chief skill. But people know this, intuitively, and it gives them the ick, so a lot of suffering follows.

So, in order to avoid suffering (the death kind, not the moralistic agonizing kind) humans work diligently on their superstructures and the stories they tell about them. Quite often, our pursuits bring us even more suffering than if we'd just accepted our fate. We could've remained in the garden, but we didn't. This is perhaps the greatest evidence for free will.

More people than ever understand human machinery. The breakdown isn't clear to me, but within this group there are some who are disgusted by the machine's capacity to inflict suffering. And then there are others who see it for what it is, without moral struggle, but are prevented from action by fear: either because they fear failure or because they fear becoming someone of disgust.

I think there's a two step method out of that fear:

1. You must believe in your vision for the future

2. You must be willing to use the machine to realize that vision.

That means you have to be a romantic. It's not enough to complain about big things. Nitpicking is a necessity, and along with it you must dream up something better. And you've got to learn to wield bureacracy and propaganda for your own benefit. That doesn't mean you must create your own, but at a minimum you must leverage it to do your bidding.

Failing to do so is nihilism. But if you can pull yourself together and power through the trough of despair, you might just have what it takes to make your little slice of earth heaven.

At least, that's all I can hope for myself.

The frontispiece to America a Prophecy by William Blake, c. 1793

America is a country of refugees. It's people fancy themselves freedom fighters, but we are all descendants of people who chose to run instead of fight. We're told that there's a culture war going on. But how can that be, when we never had any heritage to begin with?

In the last century or two, our culture has successfully drowned out all the others. Around the world, once rich traditions have become shells of their former selves. Most people attribute this to various boogeymen, like capitalism and the neo-liberal order. Technocracy provides such immense comfort that tribal ties are meaningless. They say there is no alternative, so you might as well play along: our only virtue is Progress.

But I don't buy that. Somewhere along the way people stopped believing in tradition, or at least allowed themselves to forget enough to make space for change. Whether it be mismanagement of the church or the excessive regulation by the state, people began to turn away from each other when faced with their own cultural struggles. Instead, they put their faith in the vagaries of freedom and the wild idea of a better tomorrow.

One of my favorite reads is Stefan Zweig's World of Yesterday, which chronicles the rich cultural world of Europe leading up to the first world war, and then the demise of it in the interwar years. Zweig was among the time's most renowned writers, and is one of the biggest fans of the European project. Still, during the second world war, he fled the place he loved so much, knowing he was unlikely to return.

Casablanca is one of my favorite films (cliche, I know). It only just occured to me that the people coming through Rick's Cafe are just like Zweig. They the enjoyed decades of decadence that their heritage enabled. But when faced with the slightest of conflicts, they ran for safety instead of fighting for their people. I'm sure some people thought the war would blow over and they'd return. I doubt many did.

But Casablanca is a great story because it is about resistance. The protagonists may have allowed the demise of their culture, but faced with tyranny, they chose to fight back. Rick presents a facade of neutrality, but from the beginning of the film we see his belief in good over evil. Even the chief of police in the city, as cooperative as he was with evil, made the conscious choice to side with good.

Ultimately, it was the Americans who came in to clean up the mess during the war. Yet it wasn't the culture they were fighting for. It wasn't even about freedom (none of our wars ever are). No, the technocracy must always put down rising factions. That is why things are tense with China, but we are content to merely provide aid to Ukraine's war against Russia. Xi wants to become the next chief technocrat while Vlad (for better or worse) merely wants to restore his ancestral tradition.

Of course, history never repeats itself. If America falls off the throne, it will not be from war but from atrophy. Like our ancestors, we will cease to believe in our beloved virtues. Progress may not have been a good foundational value, but it got us pretty far nonetheless. It brought us tremendous wealth and a brief period of cultural greatness (post-war to the 70s), followed by an extraordinarily decadent period where people benefitted from the culture without reinforcing it themselves.

In that respect, we look a lot like the Europe of a century ago. But this time, it is our people who suffer the loss, and I fear we have no place to retreat. There is no New America to find refuge. The irony is that there is no enemy: neither foreign nor domestic.

Nobody poses a real threat to conservative culture, and the conservatives are frankly too lazy to do anything but bitch about liberal culture. In reality, I don't think either side has a culture that's worth a damn anyhow. They are whining about stuck culture when we barely had any culture to begin with. All we know is that we love the freedom. We don't even know why we love it, because even though we have the rights we don't use them. I guess it's just in the water.

So, who's with me? It's time we stop acting like refugees and build a place worth a damn or two.

The Matrix was supposed to be a mindfuck, or so I was told. I watched the first movie for the first time yesterday, and the second one just now. I've been wrestling with a lot of themes I presumed the movies explore. Here are some thoughts:

1. the red pill, as a symbol, is the only philosophical export. I was expecting some grand Marxist critique, but I'm not even sure words like capitalism were uttered at all. Which, I guess was a good thing. In fact, most of the movie didn't feel like it had social undertones at all. It was more about Neo's coming to terms with the concept of choice.

2. I'm glad the movie didn't veer too far into sophomoric philosophy major territory, airing vague grievances with forces outside of the individual's control. At the same time, I wish that they would've gone deeper into Neo, and all the other characters for that matter. They all had this sort of aloofness that made it hard to read. Maybe that's the point. I guess living underground makes man numb.

3. Other than one Redditor, I seem to be the only person alive that thinks the entire thing was Thomas Anderson's dream. Actually, now that I think of it, if that's the case, then Christopher Nolan probably had the same thing in mind when he made Inception.

4. They did just enough world-building. Actually, they probably could've done a litte more. I'd love to see the origin story. What was the world like as people were creating the machines that would go on to make the matrix? How in the hell did they block out the sun and dig to the Earth's core? Do all humans outside Zion live in those vats? I have so many questions.

5. You can tell the Wachowskis had fun making this movie. By my estimates at least a third of the run time prominently features defiance of physics. Today, we take this for granted, but in '99 this was cutting edge. Even the style of the film felt familiar because action movies for the next decade copied it.

6. In Reloaded, the second movie, I was again looking for deeper exploration of the characters and more answers about this unique setting. Instead, I got over an hour of kung-fu fighting.

7. Neo seems sort of dead for a guy that's supposed to be super man. Even his steamy sex scene with Trinity felt like he was some sort of android instead of a human.

8. There's also a whole political drama unfolding around the plot that is given screen time, but never really advanced the plot. Maybe this manifests in the third film, but I won't hold my breath.

9. The Merovingian was slightly annoying but he was the true chaos character the film needs. Mr. Smith definitely ain't it, and while I get that the bland, faceless thing is the evil of the matrix, the lack of compelling bad guy takes the story down a notch.

10. There was also the part where his wife pulled the power move to get a kiss from Neo and I thought for sure it was going to drive a wedge between him and Trinity but it never came up. Not even juicy inner chaos with Neo here.

11. When Neo met the architect, more questions, which I don't expect to get answers to. I feel like the sequencing around this scene made it feel very rushed. The man was deciding the fate of humanity and it felt rushed because we already knew that Trinity was in trouble and that Neo was set on trying to save her.

12. The final scene where "real world" Neo uses his gifts which were only available in the Matrix lends itself well to my theory that the whole thing is a dream I refuse to believe that this divide was judiciously constructed only to be leaky.

It's 10:17. Should I dare to watch number three before bed?

There's been a lot of talk lately about sloppy football. Tom Brady said it earlier in the season, and in the wildcard playoff round I heard an announcer say the same again. Across the board, from players to coaches to referees, the lack of fundamentals is pretty obvious. You see a lot of guys missing tackles and calling dumb plays and missing blatant rules violations. Football isn't what it once was, and I think that the NFL and collegiate conferences are pleased about that.

Football has always been a spectacle: twenty-two hulking men bashing heads like American gladiators. But in the last decade or so, the game has transcended the field. No longer are there just two sports networks and a few journalists in a few dozen national markets. The internet allows everyone to be a Monday morning quarterback, and above all else, the MMQB's chief trait is outrage.

A few generations of sports fans, raised watching Pardon the Interruption and Around the Horn, now have the means to broadcast their own opinions. Not only that, but they can get on Twitter and spat with the heels of sports media. The leagues are not only well aware of it, but they also celebrate the kayfabe. Above all else, the NFL loves drama. All press is good press, so whenever controversy arises, business is booming.

I just watched the AFC championship game between the Chiefs and the Bengals. Setting aside the fact that I live in Cincinnati and have grown to be a fan, I also pride myself on being a fan of football, the game, above all else. I want to see good, clean football. All drama comes from the competitors themselves.

There were a number of questionable calls in the fourth quarter, along with a totally bizarre sequence that gave the Chiefs two shots at third down. Not too long before that happened, I tweeted that I would not complain about poor officiating, but that there is certainly too much officiating these days. The referees have become stars in their own right, so much so that the TV networks all staff rules analysts to comment on the zebras' performances.

Some time, probably about 15 years ago, instant replay really took off. The cameras  and video transmission tech got good enough that they became tools to review plays during the game. For a while, coaches were permitted a pair of appeals, which triggered the process. After a while, the leagues began instituting automatic review procedures, meant to verify scoring plays and other key moments.

That's led to a lot of sloppy officiating. This was pretty clear in the college football playoff, where officials would let play continue, just in case. It's an innocent until proven guilty strategy, requiring play to be constantly interrupted so that New York can give their take. No longer are games played out between two cities, the commisioner's office must mediate games in their entirety.

The league loves that people hate it, just like the heels in pro wrestling. Millions of people, within and outside Cincinnati, are pissed about the role the refs played this evening. Everyone feels like we didn't get to see a fair matchup, that there was something else that got in the way of true competition. And I have to say: I agree.

It feels to me that the sport I love so much, the sport that has given me so much, has lost it's purity. And those aren't just my rose colored glasses. The game has been professionalized for quite some time, but even as a kid it seemed to have a certain rag-tag charm that's gone now.

Football is no longer a game. It's now a commodity; just another product of show-business.

The Lovers by René Magritte, c. 1928

I slid the book out from the shelf. In it was a slip of faint chartreuse paper that read Book Corner -  Bloomington, Indiana at the top. It's common to see all shades of yellowing on old receipts, but never before had I seen hues of green on thermal paper. Surely, in another eleven years, the remaining ink will be gone and the hues more vibrant.

What would a sophomore at Louisville had been doing on campus in the hoosier state? It probably had something to do with music, but there's proof that she also bought a copy of Raymond Carver's short story collection, Where I'm Calling From. That receipt, our evidence, was used to mark the start one of Carver's most famous stories: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

She told me that story struck her...that at nineteen years old it informed the way she thought about love. Raised in suburban Cincinnati by a pair of school teachers, she was a bright student, a gifted musician, and the recipient of a full ride scholarship. In short, she was the kind of girl who hadn't given much thought to romance before she entered the great big world. I'm sure you know the type.

Over the next few years she'd live as most college students do: study music education and work odd jobs and meet guys. Eventually, graduation came and a real job came and she started thinking about settling down. The very idea of settling down unsettled her. She leaned on a lot of feminist literature to cope. I'm sure you know the type.

A few more years pass. She's living with a boyfriend who was still working odd jobs whenever he wasn't getting stoned and playing games with his buddies. He relied on her to pay most of the bills and wasn't the charming boy of years ago. She didn't appeciate being unappreciated, so she took a job back home. I'm sure you know the type.

---

We'd been dating for a month or so when she showed up at my house with this book. At that point, I was coming up on the one year anniversary of divorce. So I was coming at love from a very different perspective, and she knew it: When We Talk About Love was my shit test.

Carver's story is not quite to my taste, but literally tackles the question posed in the title. Two married couples, getting around getting drunk on gin, get going on the topic of love. The narrator and his wife are bystanders, representing calm and light love. We don't hear anything about them. The other couple represent frantic love: the woman (Terri) having dealt with an ex that offed himself in the name of love and the man (Mel) a strained first marriage.

The plot thickens when Mel offers a nihilistic view of love: we have all loved before and when love is lost, we find it again elsewhere. All previous love is lucky if it becomes a memory. Mel knows it's cynical, and asks to be corrected. His wife is upset, but his point stands. Later, he says he wishes his wife would die, a sign that his past has stained itself on his memory.

You can tell a lot about someone when you hear them talk about love. Their past run-ins are especially enlightening. One cannot express a drop of resentment, even under the worst relationship disintegrations. But you can't go too far the other way. Having fond recollections of old flames doesn't sit well with new suitors.

I failed that shit test, not because I was bitter, but because I was grateful.

---

When I was in college, a creep of a co-worker told me about the three month rule: after a few months of dating pass, there is a go or no-go choice. Even if things are fine, if there's any doubt, you should pull the plug after three months. No need to waste anyone's time if you don't think the relationship has legs.

Although I'd confessed to my previous marriage on the second date, the topic wasn't breeched until the three month mark. That was a month or so after I'd read Carver, but at the time I'd forgotten about the ticking time bomb and never realized the book was a test. So, of course when serious conversation about my past came up, I did not give the answers she was looking for.

I am reserved, without a big network of people and vibrant social life. So when I get to know people, and let them know me, I love. That means I'm the guy who tells his friends he loves them, who would probably tell the familiar barista he loved them too if that were socially acceptable. I have tried to learn to hate to help me cope with the world, but I don't have that in me.

So, when pressed about my past, that probably came through. I have loved before, and I honor and cherish that love. Expressing any manner of indifference wouldn't be possible. Ms. Ohio didn't like that. She'd recently made her way back to god by way of one Jordan B. Peterson (you know the type). The entire concept of divorce is something she'd struggled with, just like any good Christian.

The last time I saw her we had a very awkward conversation at a community table inside a warehouse brewery. She drove me home and the tension continued. I never saw her again. She spent the next ten days chaperoning a trip at Disney World. And for nine of them, she was trying to decide: go or no go? For reasons I don't understand, she let that kill her mood for more than a week at the happiest place on the planet.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is still on my bookshelf, marked with that pale chartreuse receipt, the only keepsake from that ninety day free trial.

---

I was never bothered by the way that relationship ended. If anything, my lack of concern is more worrysome, given my sentimental nature. But in the years since, I have come to see the signs and symbols at play.

As the great Ricky Bobby once said, if you're not first, you're last. The Carver story brings up memories, but frames them as things to be forgotten. What do we do when we not only can't forget, but have vivid recollection of past love? What do you do when some other person is engrained in the lore of your partner? When the other's name comes up in storytime at family gatherings, where an uncle calls you by the wrong name?

We do not answer these questions. It is our natural inclination to repress them, the other becomes the one who shall not be named. But it just becomes baggage to tote through life, from apartment to apartment, from the garage to the attic, hoping that they stay zipped away in storage for good.

I just watched the final episode of The Last Kingdom. A couple years back, I stumbled upon the show and watched the first five seasons in about a week. Sometime in the last year or so, the final season was released, but as I don't watch much TV these days, it slipped through the cracks. I remembered it a few days ago and finished what I started.

The premise of the show revolves around the 11th century Saxon peoples aiming to unite all the kingdoms into England. Along with a game of thrones, they struggle taming the barbaric Danes throughout the realm. There is a great warrior, born a Christian but raised a Dane, who fights to do the most Right he can to achieve harmony amongst the two ways of life.

To me, there are a few themes that stuck out, some obvious in the first watching and others only now. I think my spotting of these things was heavily influenced by my own status while viewing.

Earlier, the tension between a savage way of life and a proto-modern way stood out. The Saxons, along with their undying belief in one true god, benefitted from great scholarship. Priests and chroniclers play a big role, interpreting the history of the world and formulating grand visions for their own storybooks. They'd also developed military technologies that helped them fight off the unorganized Danes.

The Last Kingdom, without saying it aloud, demonstrates the power of certainty. The Saxons created a sophisticated order which could anticipate and respond to chaos. They always had the Danes on their heals, so much so that the savages would foresake their many gods and swear to both the king and the Christian god. This is a story about will against destiny.

And that's what is so striking now. All but a single woman believes in fate; in one true path for everyone. The Kings believe that it is their destiny to build god's empire. Their lackeys and soldiers believe in the divinity of the king. And of course, the clergy surrounding all of this believe in embodying the word of god.

The main character and his Danish pals also believe in the sway of their own gods. They are merely carrying out the destiny of their ancestors who set out to settle on fertile lands. And their witches are a gateway to the gods, who will surely steer them the right way.

Throughout the show, and especially the final season, Utred, the Saxon-Dane warrior of a main character, struggles with his destiny. It is only when he runs into his long warrior-nun friend that he realizes he has free will. Her name was Hild, and in a cast of great characters, she was quiet and understated, but left a mark on me.

I think it's because she was both a woman of god, but had also fought and killed. She understood that faith must be protected; that if you believe in something you will eventually have to fight for it. Her message to Utred was: you have been on this path, and while you may have a fated future, you can't be sure if that time is now. You can only exert agency and believe that you're capable of fulfilling your dreams.