October 11, 2025
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 [Jess…
October 11, 2025
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.