History rides again

One really must not become insen­sate to the fact that com­puters got super weird, super fast. After what I esti­mate as a full decade of stuckness, with a glacial end-of-computing-history sort of feeling, the ice has cracked entirely open. The present unfolding reality, the day-to-day of it, would read as laugh­able if, circa 2020, I’d ren­dered it in a work of near-future sci-fi: the work of a writer who fun­da­men­tally didn’t under­stand com­puters.

You might recall the “word­cels vs. shape rota­tors” meme from a few years ago. Among the cas­cading sur­prises of the 2020s is that effec­tive use of bleeding-edge tech­nology demands total synthesis: either word­cels and shape rota­tors working hand in hand, or the elu­sive hybrid.

You get a sense of that in Jesse Vincent’s post about his use of Claude Code: it’s clear his approach is both highly tech­nical and like, psy­cho­log­i­cally (?!) sophis­ti­cated (??!!):

It made sense to me that the per­sua­sion prin­ci­ples I learned in Robert Cialdini’s Influ­ence would work when applied to LLMs. And I was pleased that they did.

Honestly, I don’t totally under­stand what Jesse is doing here, but/and I find it very provocative. Going back to the theme of leverage, I rec­og­nize in Jesse’s thinking some familiar roles: among them, coach and therapist.

It all makes me feel pretty itchy, which is, of course, a healthy sign. Nothing on com­puter screens in the 2010s made me itch. I’d still rather write the code myself, yet I’m delighted that people like Jesse (whose keyboards are amazing) are exploring these techniques, if only because they are so WEIRD, so gen­uinely surprising.