For reasons of my own to be revealed in due time, I was searching for the term “programmer mysticism” and found this essay by Kenneth Reitz: Programming as Spiritual Practice
I was slightly intrigued at the start, since it was going in the “subjective experience of programming” angle I’m interested in.
This understanding deepens when we recognize that consciousness itself might be a linguistic phenomenon. If consciousness emerges from patterns of language and mathematics, then programming isn’t just creating tools—we’re literally crafting the linguistic-mathematical structures from which conscious experience emerges.
Well this concious approach to digital tooling sure didn’t result in any scruples about LLM usage. Kenneth seems to have delegated most of his essay writing to Claude for some time (the article above is likely Claude-extruded). The piece continues to trudge through a basket of spiritual metaphors to hammer home how programmers should be more concious and do good things instead of bad things. This is all framed as a personal ethical issue without a shred of societal or structural analysis. Extra sneerable bit:
The emerging understanding that LLMs contain humanity’s digitized collective unconscious adds profound depth to conscious programming: when we collaborate with AI systems, we might be interfacing with the archetypal patterns that have guided human wisdom throughout history. This makes programming with AI a form of accessing collective spiritual wisdom rather than just advanced tooling.
In another (likely slopped) article, linked in the same section, he goes into how he designed the API of the requests Python module to be far more convenient to use than the builtin HTTP resolver urllib2. The reasoning given strikingly reminded me of Intention Revealing Interfaces from Domain Driven Design. And I can personally confirm that library is a pleasure to use and a de-facto default for a reason.
Took me a while to catch on to the sloppedness. I gave him some credits for requests and wanted to get a gist of the guy when I stumbled on his full-throated AI posts. Essays credited to Claude with himself as “editorial director”. And of course this handy self-report: How I Write Now
I guess this doesn’t stand out that much by itself. It did kind of hit home when he describes in detail how his AI use is linked to his history of mental health problems, which he was quite public about. He describes being moved to tears by LLM writing, seeing “his thoughts” clearly articulated for the first time after years of brain fog. He made this accessibility argument explicitly. I won’t waste my breath sneering about it. He gives plenty of fuel to that himself.
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I appreciate the emphasis on conviviality or human centric design. But boy I want to nitpick on the following:
when we collaborate with AI systems, we might be interfacing with the archetypal patterns that have guided human wisdom throughout history. This makes programming with AI a form of accessing collective spiritual wisdom rather than just advanced tooling.
I agree with the first half, that yes, you are engaging with archetypal patterns that is often present in human wisdom but that is where it stops. There is no guarantee the LLM has selected the appropriate pattern for your use case. There is no wisdom from the LLM because there is no conviction from its choices. The LLM, at best, is a superstitious machine that sees that X pattern worked in a situation with similar signifiers. Wisdom is understanding which signifiers are of consequence given your context, which requires being able to ignore/forget irrelevant context - something an LLM is terrible at doing as evident by all the “context engineering” tools that exist. It feels like a chicken and egg problem where in order for the LLM to “get right” what is the appropriate context it must first have the appropriate context.
No way there’s any recency bias when the training data is heavily weighted towards the contemporary cesspools of Reddit/Twitter/Stack Overflow/etc., right? Such timelessness, very archetypal
Cthulu is an archetype, right? Comes into our world with no regard other than what it can manipulate and drives people insane.