Poiesic Systems

Like everyone else I’ve been trying to understand the impact of AI on the job market. Calling the current state of things ‘murky’ is a understatement. Things are moving fast. It seems new models and products like Anthropic’s Mythos and Claude Design dramatically reshape the landscape every week or two promising more capabilities and likely more job automation. At the same time there’s polls showing bipartisan support for data center construction moratoriums. Then there’s Microsoft’s recent announcement they are pausing Copilot sign-ups for single-user plans which suggests even the hyperscalers are struggling with AI’s economics.

Lately I’ve been taking some time to focus on creative hobbies. Somewhere along the way they got shoved to the margins to make way for work and life. I want to correct that. One of my favorite creative hobbies is writing fiction. For the longest time I used Scrivener but it never became second nature. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an amazing product and works well for a lot of people. It just missed the mark for me.

So I wrote nib. I’ve used it to write a 90k word rough draft of a novel, fixing bugs and adding features as I’ve needed them. And now I’d like to share it.

Like many software engineers of my vintage (Gen X) my core influences include William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and The Matrix movie series. That’s right, cyberpunk baby. Of course, despite the hopes and dreams of a generation we didn’t get Gibsonian cyberspace. We got the web in all it’s hacky glory. Don’t get me wrong, though. The web is very cool.

It’s just not as cool as jacking in to your custom Ono-Sendai deck and hacking some Tessier-Ashpool ICE while your vat-grown ninja from the black clinics in Chiba has your back.

In 1953, a twenty-seven-year-old man named Henry Molaison underwent surgery to treat severe epilepsy. Surgeons removed most of his hippocampus, a small curved structure deep in the temporal lobe, from both hemispheres. The seizures improved. Henry stopped making long-term memories.

Henry could carry on a perfectly coherent conversation. His intelligence was intact. His working memory functioned normally. He could hold information in mind, reason about it, and respond appropriately. He had full access to memories formed before the surgery. His personality was unchanged.

He just couldn’t form new long-term memories. Every conversation started fresh. His doctors reintroduced themselves at every visit for the next fifty-five years. He could read the same magazine and find it novel each time. He would grieve his uncle’s death anew every time someone told him.

There’s a new discipline coming to software engineering. I’m calling it forensic refactoring: the practice of reverse-engineering intent from code that never had any.