Collective Fate in the Kingdom of Individualists (LLO Archive)
Created 2025-12-13, last modified 2025-12-13. Visibility: public
Part of my archive of Layover Linux Official posts on Tumblr.
2025-11-18
Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns
A very old article these days, but it was foundational for me at an impressionable age, and you can probably hear its influence on me in some of my own writing and thinking. The seed of my war on classes was planted in 2006. Or whenever I read this after it was published, anyways!
2025-11-19
That old Java Kingdom of Nouns post kinda sucked me back into reading more of Steve Yegge, and it's really striking how many of his old posts are insightful, and how rare it is to see a good take in his new stuff.
Don't get me wrong, his old posts are usually a bit sloppy and lazy, but (again, usually) that's the delivery medium for some sort of valuable and correct observation about the programming ecosystem. He says the things I might, the way I might, if I was two drinks deep at a bar and looking to start a fight with the Haskell developer who's been giving me side-eye for the last ten minutes. "Casually confrontational" is probably the best way to describe the style. And honestly, I don't hate it - it's a style that works well for cutting through social Gordian Knots of seriousness and dogma.
So even though I've never elevated him to a place of hero worship (and I do have qualified hero worship for a lot of smart people like Casey Muratori), it's still weird to see his present-day takes on, for example, the impact of AI on the programming landscape of today. Especially because it's not evenly terrible - he'll remark on the very real problem of how AI is primarily drying up the paid work for junior developers, which will eventually lead to a genuine supply crisis on the senior end of the spectrum, and then propose the solution "everyone should learn vibe coding as the primary paradigm of development." As if that's an on-ramp to deep understanding, or a stable way to pitch your personal value to a company in this era of universal belt-tightening and AI corporate grifters full of false promises.
I do honestly think some of it is just like... in the late 2000s and early 2010s, it was this whole era where a lot of programmers were really sheltered from any perceived need to "get good" at thinking in terms of big picture humanism. Hyperindividualism was common because, well, there wasn't really any evolutionary pressure against it. You wouldn't have gotten very far proposing a union in the average shop, but not out of fear of retaliation, so much as "we already have it good and we always will, no reason to put a hostile chill between us and our bosses." In hindsight, it adds a layer of dark comedy to the old attitudes that we could and should solve all of the world's problems with software and logical thinking, if only they would put programmers in charge - put me in, coach! There was a lot of Dunning-Kruger to that attitude; a very small percentage of those programmers actually had the philosophical or emotional or social awareness to shoulder that level of responsibility. They just had a boundless confidence from solving a narrower field of hard problems, which leads to looking at stuff outside one's field and saying "how hard could it be?"
So now we live in a world where climate change is no longer a thing that's technically visible, but easy to look the other way and not see it. Software development is now facing an existential/sustainability crisis that AI can't solve, only exacerbate. The layoffs and abuse have finally arrived at our non-union doorsteps. You probably have minority coworkers now who have well-justified reasons to be scared shitless under the current USAmerican political regime. This all leaves a lot of niche-smart people in my field in a position that feels straight out of the fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper: winter is falling, and many of us didn't spend the fat years preparing for the lean.
The Death of the Stubborn Developer
I’ve been talking to publishers, researchers, industry mavens, you name it. Everyone understands at some level that chat-oriented programming is the next big evolutionary phase for programming. The last one this big was the jump from assembly to high-level languages.
This is the kind of thing you only say/believe when you're still trying to address 2020s industry problems with 2010s industry hubris.
It's hard to say why I'm spending the energy to talk about this. I'm not some jilted devotee, nor a long-time hater. I guess I'm just trying to rubber-duck my way to understanding something that keeps leaving me scratching my head: how so many demonstrably intelligent people are walking into nigh-upon-us 2026 with so many gaping holes in their critical thinking. Where will you get the wood for your treehouse when you're done harvesting the trunk of the tree it's mounted in?
