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Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/128.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/{VERSION} (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/)", "https://sinclairtarget.com/blog/2026/06/01/quality-in-the-age-of-slop/" ], "cmd_version": "8.10.1", "end_ts": "2026-06-03T03:58:12.255765+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "headers.json", "pwd": "/data/archive/1780459082.043398", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-06-03T03:58:11.959627+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "htmltotext": [ { "cmd": [ "(internal) archivebox.extractors.htmltotext", "./{singlefile,dom}.html" ], "cmd_version": "0.8.5rc51", "end_ts": "2026-06-03T03:58:51.549682+00:00", "index_texts": [ "Quality in the Age of Slop (/favicon.ico) (https://fonts.googleapis.com) (https://fonts.gstatic.com) (https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Inter:ital,opsz,wght@0,14..32,100..900;1,14..32,100..900&family=Open+Sans:wght@300..800&family=Ubuntu+Mono&display=swap) (/style.css) (/syntax.css) (/) Sinclair Target (/) About/Projects (/blog) Blog Posts (/feed.xml) Quality in the Age of Slop Jun 01, 2026 This blog post is very long and almost entirely about the 1974 bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig. It is also\nabout AI\u2014there will be some juicy takes, pinky swear\u2014but those familiar with ZAMM should consider themselves warned. Those unfamiliar with ZAMM are owed some context. Many see ZAMM as a\npretentious book, the kind of book your freshman-year roommate (the one who\nwrote haikus at 2am by moonlight) would have gushed about. It has a middling\n3.78 rating on GoodReads, but it's the reviews that capture how the people who\ndon't like ZAMM feel about ZAMM . Here's user \"Zora,\" who rated the book one\nout of five stars: I learned from this book that you can sell a billion copies of a book that no\none should ever waste three minutes reading. This is just another\nneo-philosophy book disguised as a novel. I'm almost convinced that the\nonly reason people buy this book is so that their pseudo-intellectual (read:\npompous scumbag) friends will accept them into their hippie circle. Although\nI know about twenty people who claim to have read this book, I have yet to\nmeet a single person who actually knows what it's about. This book is a\nbigger hoax than the bible. \u2014Zora And here's user \"Lala BooksandLala,\" who also gave a one-star rating but\nexpressed herself more succinctly: absolutely not \u2014Lala BooksandLala So I will admit that a blog post about ZAMM and AI might not sound like a\ngood time; if there's anything more pretentious than ZAMM itself then surely\nit is a blog post about ZAMM . But I hope that by starting with this frank\ncontent warning I've won myself some of your trust, maybe even enough that\nyou'll be game to buckle in for the winding theme-park boat ride through ZAMM that I'm eager to take you on. Because, pretentious as ZAMM may be, I really\ncan't stop thinking about it now that we have to contend with the Maw. What is the Maw? The Maw is the gaping pit of nihilism that has opened up in\nthe middle of the tech industry. The Maw is the explicit or implicit subject of\nroughly 63% of blog posts now shared on link aggregators like Hacker News, the\nsubject that nobody can resist writing about, even authors who typically write\nabout SAT solvers or microservices. The Maw is the looming threat that has\nprompted such an outpouring of cris de couer in the blogosphere, which\nsome might view as\u2014though I hope events don't go this way\u2014just the death\nbraying of a highly literate professional class. Lately, we had (https://ky.fyi/posts/ai-burnout) \"Do I Belong in Tech Anymore?\" ,\nwhich resonated with many emotionally. Of course, there was also the epic\n10-parter, (https://aphyr.com/posts/411-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess) \"The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess.\" My personal favorite is (https://blog.glyph.im/2025/06/i-think-im-done-thinking-about-genai-for-now.html) \"I Think I'm Done Thinking About Gen AI for\nNow,\" which is notable for complaining primarily about the aesthetics of AI and perhaps also for (https://blog.glyph.im/2026/01/how-to-argue-with-me-about-ai.html) how quickly its author was not, in\nfact, done thinking about Gen AI . We, the\nsoftware engineers, are clearly working through something. Software engineers aren't known for shying away from new technology, so it\nfeels like you need an extraordinarily good reason to opt out of using the\nlatest agentic coding tools. And yet I think many of us are so disturbed by the\nimplications of letting linear algebra write software that we are looking to\narticulate that reason, looking to cobble together a defense of the values that\nheretofore we took for granted but now are under attack. This attack isn't just the one implied by how capable AI coding tools have\nbecome. This attack sometimes comes from actual people. On Hacker News and\nsimilar sites, it's common to see something like the following: Commenter A,\nexpressing sympathy with an anti-AI blog post, recounts how the last time he or\nshe used Claude Code it came up with a name for a function that was subtly\nmisleading. Commenter B, Maw acolyte, then swoops in, asking why commenter A\neven cares about how functions are named, given that Claude can just read the\nwhole function body to understand what the function does anyway, without\nbreaking a sweat , and furthermore doesn't commenter A realize that soon enough\nno humans will be reading the code at all? Commenter B appears to be suggesting that software engineering is over. Not\njust that many individual software engineers will be out of a job, but that the\nentire discipline of software engineering\u2014the accumulated wisdom about best\npractices, about effective architecture, about how to make software\nmaintainable and performant\u2014is defunct. That the difference between an accurate\nname and an inaccurate one doesn't matter if the AI can still spit out working\nsoftware. This is what scares me most about the Maw. It seems to want to swallow forever\nthe distinction between good and bad, leaving a world in which there is only\ncode that works and code that doesn't, and no code that is beautiful, or\nexcellent, or virtuous, or funny. Every time I've encountered a comment written by commenter B, I've fallen into\na bout of despair. I feel despair because I've always found the pursuit of\nexcellence in my chosen profession motivating, but on my darker days I worry\nabout whether excellence matters anymore. It seems improbable to me that AI\nwill really make software engineers obsolete, though I can't know the future;\nwhat seems more probable is that the software industry will value technical\ncraft less than it did before. If I want to keep my faith in excellence, I'll\nhave to shore it up for myself. And so I have big, urgent questions: Is there\nstill such a thing as a good programmer? As good code? If there is, why does\n\"good\" matter? What would it look like to be a good programmer who uses AI\ntools? What do I consider good, in the face of the Maw? I can't stop thinking about ZAMM because I've discovered that this novel from\n1974 ostensibly about motorcycles has helped me with these questions. In\nbetween some plodding bits about Aristotle and what Montana looks like from the\nhighway, in ZAMM I've found a convincing\u2014even moving\u2014vindication of the\ncraftsman ethos latent in so many of the blog posts critical of AI. I suppose\nthis is my attempt to grab everyone by the collar and yell, \"Don't you see?\nThis is all straight out of ZAMM !\", hoping that ZAMM 's elevation of craft\ngives others the same comfort and guidance that it has given me. In case you don't care for motorcycles, let me first persuade you that ZAMM is actually a book about programming. At least, it's as much a book about\nprogramming as it is a book about motorcycles. ZAMM might as well be called Zen and the Art of Software Maintenance because maintaining motorcycles and maintaining software are, by ZAMM 's own\nyardstick, fundamentally the same activity. This seems surprising because we\nthink of motorcycle maintenance as something that requires getting your hands\ngreasy and of programming as something that does not. Yet to get hung up on\nthat difference would be to misunderstand where the real action of motorcycle\nmaintenance is: An untrained observer will see only physical labor and often get the idea\nthat physical labor is mainly what the mechanic does. Actually the physical\nlabor is the smallest and easiest part of what the mechanic does. By far the\ngreater part of his work is careful observation and precise thinking. That is\nwhy mechanics sometimes seem so taciturn and withdrawn when performing tests.\nThey don't like it when you talk to them because they are concentrating on\nmental images, hierarchies, and not really looking at you or the physical\nmotorcycle at all. \u2014ZAMM , Chapter 9 In order to fix a faulty motorcycle, a mechanic needs to debug the fault, and\nthat debugging process is the same whether the fault is an engine that won't\nstart or a web service that keeps getting deadlocked. It's been a meme since at\nleast 2010's The Social Network that you don't interrupt a programmer who's\n\"wired in\"; apparently the same thing has always been true for motorcycle\nmechanics. Both the programmer and the mechanic have to steady wobbly towers\nof abstractions in their heads to make any progress. There is one bit in ZAMM about how keeping a stool on either side of your\nbike will save your back in the long run, and another bit about how to be\ndelicate with precision parts, but these are the only pieces of direct advice\nin the entire book about how to physically maintain a motorcycle. Everything\nelse ZAMM has to say about motorcycle maintenance involves the state of mind\nof the mechanic, and so is equally applicable to programming. Many of these things ZAMM has to say operate in the airy realm of philosophy,\nand we'll get to that in a minute, but if all you wanted from ZAMM was\npractical tips for working on your next software project it has more of those\nthan you'd think. Take the chapter devoted to \"gumption traps.\" \"Gumption\" is the\nreserve of willpower you have available for the intellectual exertion of\nmaintenance, the \"psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going.\" A\n\"gumption trap\" is an event occurring during maintenance that drains a large\nfraction of your gumption at once. Gumption traps come in many varieties, but all will be familiar to working\nsoftware engineers. There's the \"intermittent failure setback\", which is when\n\"the thing that is wrong becomes right all of a sudden just as you start to fix\nit.\" In software engineering, this is known as a could-not-reproduce, or in\nbad cases as a Heisenbug; these drain your gumption when you let yourself be\nfooled into thinking that actually everything is working, only for the problem\nto crop up again. There's also the \"impatience trap,\" which can happen when you\nunderestimate how long a task will require and, as you fall behind your\nexpected schedule, grow more and more tempted to take shortcuts. Unless you\nstop and accept the minor gumption hit of admitting that your estimate was\nwrong, you're vulnerable to experiencing a catastrophic loss of gumption when\none of your shortcuts leads to a big mistake that delays you even further. The advice in ZAMM is so relevant to programming that I wondered whether\nPirsig, ZAMM 's author, had ever done any programming himself. The answer is\nyes. He was a big computer guy. At the Smithsonian, there is (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/zen-motorcycle-still-inspires-philosophical-road-trippers-50-years-later-180984143/) an exhibit\ndisplaying Pirsig's 1966 Honda Super Hawk motorcycle next to his Apple\nII . His Apple II is tricked out with seven expansion cards,\nwhich, according to people who know more about the Apple II than I do, is a lot\nof expansion cards. He couldn't have bought his Apple II until well after ZAMM was published (the Apple II was released in 1977), but he was a computer\nguy even before that, since he worked as a technical writer for Honeywell.\nThere are several analogies in ZAMM involving circuits and digital computer\nmanuals. It would have been a worse novel, but had Pirsig written ZAMM ten or twenty\nyears later it could easily have been about computers and surfing the net\ninstead of motorcycles and roadtripping the West. Many passages would carry\nover almost verbatim. Okay, thus far, I might have given you the impression that even if ZAMM isn't\nreally about motorcycles it's still mostly about maintaining things. Actually, ZAMM is only about maintaining things as a gateway to ZAMM 's big main idea,\n\"Quality.\" (Yes, with a capital \"Q.\") Quality and how it relates to AI programming tools is what I want to get to,\nbut first I need to explain what Pirsig means by \"Quality.\" This part might\ndrag a little, which is why I wanted to sell you beforehand on how ZAMM is\nfull of highly germane and useful advice about programming. Computers! We're\nhere to talk about computers. But also an amateur philosopher's ideas about\nrhetoric and aesthetics. Please don't unbuckle and make a break for the nearest\nexit. ZAMM is structured like an intellectual mystery novel. The inciting incident\noccurs in the first chapter, when Pirsig notices that he and his riding\ncompanion, John, have very different attitudes toward their motorcycles. John\nhas purchased the most reliable motorcycle money can buy, a German-made BMW,\nhoping he can avoid what he sees as the ugly, fussy business of maintaining the\nmotorcycle himself. He'd prefer not have to think about how it works at all.\nThis astounds Pirsig; John's attitude seems impractical and besides there's so\nmuch beauty to appreciate in the inner workings of a motorcycle. Pirsig's\nattempt to account for this discrepancy between John and himself mushrooms into\nthe giant system of thought that takes up the rest of the book. The mystery in ZAMM , rather than \"whodunit,\" is whether there is an idea that\ncan tie John's view of the world and Pirsig's view together. Pirsig believes\nJohn's attitude represents the way many people in the 60s and 70s feel about\ntechnology\u2014that technology is hostile, controlling, and square . He\nsympathizes with this view but also knows that technology doesn't have to be\nthis way and wonders what went wrong. Pirsig decides that John's view\nrepresents the \"romantic\" understanding of the world, one concerned with\nemotion and the immediate impressions of things, while his view represents the\n\"classical\" understanding of the world, one concerned with underlying form and\nlogical abstractions. What went wrong is that these two understandings at some\npoint diverged, and also that technology and society have become so\noppressively dominated by the classical understanding that people need to\ntake long motorcycle roadtrips to get away from it. Pirsig thinks we need both\nmodes of understanding to build technology that serves human flourishing, but\nhe's missing a \"fulcrum idea\" that could reconcile them. Pirsig recalls how earlier in his life, while employed as a college instructor\nteaching rhetoric, he questioned what he was even supposed to be teaching\nhis students. His job was to teach them good writing, which he did by pointing\nout the various little devices\u2014metaphor, parallelism, anaphora\u2014that good\nwriters employ. Yet an essay could have all of these and be bad, or none of\nthem and be good. And his students seemed to know good writing from bad writing\nalready, even if they couldn't write well themselves or name all the rhetorical\ndevices. Teaching rhetoric seemed to call for the romantic mode of\nunderstanding to be admitted to the classroom, but how could that fly in a\nuniversity, a bastion of the classical mode, where you aren't supposed to teach\nstudents that \"good\" is whatever they like? And is that even what he wanted to\nteach them? That didn't sound right either. Pirsig realizes that what he was trying to teach his students is Quality. This\nis the idea that unites the romantic and the classical. He says that\nQuality is something we can all recognize but nobody can formally define. Over the following several chapters, Pirsig explains what he means with some\nmetaphysics. (This is likely where many readers sour on ZAMM ; it's the\nleast convincing part of the book.) Under Pirsig's metaphysical regime, whether\nsomething\u2014a piece of writing, a motorcycle, an experience\u2014is \"high-Quality\" or\n\"low-Quality\" isn't objective, because it isn't measurable, but nor is it\nsubjective, because Quality creates subjects and not the other way around.\nQuality is a kind of sieve on reality that is applied before we can even\nunderstand there to be subjects and objects at all. This is hard to wrap your head around. I'm not sure I understand it. I refer\nyou to ZAMM if you want a better explanation, since I probably haven't done\nit justice. In any case, I think the actually brilliant thing that Pirsig has done\nis land on the name \"Quality.\" Pirsig is trying to answer that age-old\nquestion in ethics, \"What is Good?\", which is basically also that age-old\nquestion in aesthetics, \"What is Beautiful?\"\u2014questions that are thorny in the\nextreme because for them to be meaningful surely the answer has to apply to\neveryone, yet nobody seems to have been able to prove that\ntheir notion of Good really is the Good universally. Pirsig's answer is,\n\"What if we call it 'Quality' instead?\" The name \"Quality\" is a smudge; it\nconflates \"quality\" as in \"high-value\" with \"quality\" as in \"characteristic\" or\n\"feature.\" This is brilliant because since Plato's Republic everyone has been\ntrying to argue logically for their version of the Good, but \"Quality\" suggests\nthat the Good is immediately perceived, that it's immanent in our experiences\nof the world and comes before logic and reason. Here I start to find Pirsig more convincing. He goes on to point out that\nscience and math, while consistent and logical within their domain, have\nQuality judgments in their underpinnings and all around their periphery. In\ngeometry, once you have your axioms, everything can be derived with\nunassailable certainty, but if you choose different axioms you end up with\ndifferent geometries, and whether one set of axioms is more \"right\" than\nanother is mostly a matter of taste and fitness for purpose\u2014call it \"Quality.\"\nIn science, once you have a hypothesis, the scientific method tells you what to\ndo, but choosing a hypothesis from the ocean of possible hypotheses is an art\nwithout any prescribed method. Pirsig quotes Henri Poincair\u00e9, who says that the mathematician or scientist at\nthe cutting edge of knowledge must choose among the many possibilities one can\nderive from existing laws, and that \"the rules that must guide the choice are\nextremely fine and delicate. It's almost impossible to state them precisely;\nthey must be felt rather than formulated.\" This sounds a lot like the\nsituation in Pirsig's rhetoric class. We've already dawdled here for far too long, but I can't resist giving you\nanother example, one that doesn't appear in ZAMM but which I think epitomizes\nPirsig's argument. Consider Occam's Razor. This is the principle in science\nthat if you can explain something with a simpler theory you should. It is the\nonly thing stopping you from concocting a more complicated but still\nempirically valid law of gravity that says gravity exists because all matter\nfondly misses being smushed together before the big bang. As long as your\ntheory can be used to predict things accurately, why not use it? Occam's Razor\nsays that you shouldn't use it because the missing-being-smushed part is\nextraneous, but that's an aesthetic judgment, a Quality judgment, through and\nthrough! What Pirsig is really trying to show is that the romantic mode of understanding\nand the classical mode of understanding, far from being opposed to one another,\nare in the best of science and technology intertwined. As he writes, \"the\ndictum that Science and its offspring, technology, are 'value free,' that is,\n'quality free,' has got to go.\" We might think of our surface impressions of\nthings as somehow inferior to \"true\" knowledge because they don't involve\nrigorous logic, but Pirsig wants to remind us, as he puts it, that our\nimpressions of Quality are \"the leading edge of the train of knowledge\" and\nwithout them \"the entire train has no way of knowing where to go.\" Much of the criticism of AI from software engineers has focused on whether\nagentic programming tools can do what the big AI companies claim they can do.\nThere have been blog posts about AI tools where the punchline is that the AI\nfouled up the codebase or hallucinated a function in a library that doesn't\nexist. While I agree that currently AI tools often make mistakes, I suspect\nthat this debate about effectiveness is beside the point and many of the\nengineers criticizing AI would prefer not to use agentic tools even if they\nworked as advertised. I have struggled with this. I have felt a deep disquiet about AI tools that I\nworry I can't justify, because I know it'd still be there even if\nClaude Code worked flawlessly. This has bothered me so much that we're now\nthousands of words deep into my attempt to work it out. I want to go back to the blog post I mentioned above, (https://blog.glyph.im/2025/06/i-think-im-done-thinking-about-genai-for-now.html) \"I Think I'm Done\nThinking about Gen AI for Now,\" which I love for being brave\nenough to get into all this. Responding to other software engineers writing\nenthusiastically about AI, the author says this: I cannot effectively respond to these folks, because they are making a practical argument that I cannot, despite my best efforts, find compelling\nevidence to refute categorically. My experiences of genAI are all extremely\nbad, but that is barely even anecdata. Their experiences are\nneutral-to-positive. Little scientific data exists. How to resolve this? Later, the author explains why his experiences with AI have been negative: My factual analysis of genAI is hopelessly negatively biased. I find the vast\nmajority of the aesthetic properties of genAI to be intensely unpleasant. And finally he concludes: Would I like to use this magic robot that could mostly just emit working\ncode for me? Would I use it if it were free , in all senses of the word? No. I absolutely would not. There's something poignant about how strongly he feels repulsed by AI and yet\nhow tied up in knots he is about not being able to prove his case with data in\nsome disinterested, unbiased way. I can certainly relate. If I squint, I can\nsee how (https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-ai-adoption-journey) someone might be able to use coding agents in a way I can\nadmire , but of the more typical case where people seem to be\ndelegating authorship to the machine I can only say that it seems low-Quality.\nThat it can't possibly lead to good code because there's no human excellence in\nit. But that seems so subjective! Can I really make a case for \"human\nexcellence\" if one day it stands in the way of what could be quantifiable\ngains in productivity? ZAMM has helped me here in two ways. First, ZAMM has helped me understand that I've been stuck in the classical\nmode of thinking. In the last third of the book, which is much better than the\nmiddle, Pirsig says that he wants to forget about all the metaphysics and\ninvestigate what Quality means for daily life. He says the most important thing\nthat Quality can do is expand reason to include things that were previously\ninadmissible. This is important because it's \"the overwhelming presence of\nthese irrational elements crying for assimilation that creates the present bad\nquality, the chaotic, disconnected spirit\" of our modern age. The classical\nmode so dominates our thinking today that somehow I've decided my visceral,\npre-intellectual distaste for AI is something I should discount rather than\nheed. Pirsig might say that my opinion on AI is neither subjective nor objective\nbecause it derives from a perception of Quality. I'm not sure I can make heads\nor tails of that. I would instead say that my opinion is subjective\u2014is\nhopelessly biased\u2014but what ZAMM has helped me appreciate is that everybody\nelse's opinion is too, even when it might not appear that way. Someone could\ncome to me with lots of studies that show programmers on average produce 50%\nmore lines of code per day using coding agents. This person has data! But I\nwould be entirely justified in asking, \"Why do we care about these additional\nlines of code? Is there some important end that makes producing this code worth\ndiminishing our capacity for excellence, or will we just be shoveling a glut of\nill-conceived features into software products that already fail to delight the\nsoul? What Quality judgment have you made that says writing 50% more code\nthis way serves human flourishing?\" Second, ZAMM has helped me better understand my reservations about AI. Pirsig\nsays that the problem with modern technology is that it has become dominated by\na classical \"subject-object\" way of looking at things. He talks about how, in\nmanuals for consumer products, every line conveys the idea that the grill/lawn\nmower/dish washer/computer has no relationship to you, and you have no\nrelationship to it, other than to operate it. What counts as good grilling, or\nlawn mowing, or computing etc. is always taken for granted, even though that's\nthe most important part. We have a society in which technology is created by\npeople who are disinterested in it to be sold to people who are also assumed to\nbe disinterested in it. Pirsig believes that to fix this problem technologists need to identify with\nthe work that they are doing rather than allow any estrangement to come\nbetween themselves and the machine: The mechanic I'm talking about doesn't make this separation. One says of him\nthat he is \"interested\" in what he's doing, that he's \"involved\" in his work.\nWhat produces this involvement is, at the cutting edge of consciousness, an\nabsence of any sense of separateness of subject and object.... When one isn't\ndominated by feelings of separateness from what he's working on, then one can\nbe said to \"care\" about what he's doing. That is what caring really is, a\nfeeling of identification with what one's doing. When one has this feeling\nthen he also sees the inverse side of caring, Quality itself. \u2014ZAMM , Chapter 25 Quality is related to caring because once you care, once you are interested,\nyou have a vantage point from which to make Quality judgments. These Quality\njudgments (e.g. \"Is this good code?\") are based in part on the romantic mode of\nunderstanding and so within the classical mode alone aren't defensible. But\nthey are necessary, because in the moment-to-moment work on the machine, there\nare thousands of facts you could consider, thousands of alternative threads you\ncould follow, all equally valid in the classical mode, and the only way to make\nany sense of it all is to apply a Quality-focused version of Occam's Razor: To put it in more concrete terms: If you want to build a factory, or fix a\nmotorcycle, or set a nation right without getting stuck, then classical,\nstructured, dualistic subject-object knowledge, although necessary, isn't\nenough. You have to have some feeling for the quality of the work. You have\nto have a sense for what's good. That is what carries you forward. \u2014ZAMM , Chapter 24 I can't see how I could offload programming to a coding agent without losing\nthis sense for \"the quality of the work.\" I have found LLMs extremely useful as\na search tool and as a kind of super-charged rubber ducking partner. But to use\nan LLM to write code\u2014when LLMs include randomness as an essential part of\nhow they work\u2014when the whole selling point of these tools is that they can\nproduce more code than I can keep up with\u2014would only be putting a layer of\nfriction between myself and what I'm building. It would make it harder to lose\nmyself in the work. It would make it harder to care. I am in my mid-thirties. Many noble things have happened in my lifetime\u2014we've\ncured diseases, made people in the poorest nations wealthier, and even started\ngoing back to the moon. But I can't help feeling that in those same 30 years\nthere has been a hallowing out of shared purpose that has left the world more\ncynical than before. My wife and I are expecting our first child later this year. A daughter! I'm\nbeyond excited. But I also fear for what the world will be like another thirty\nyears from now, when she's my age. I hope my daughter can live in a world where people identify with the work they\ndo and care to be excellent at it. Writing rambling blog posts like this one\nprobably won't help achieve that. But what I can do, perhaps the most\nimportant thing I can do, is strive in my own work to set an example for her. The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and\nhands, and then work outward from there. Other people can talk about how to\nexpand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a\nmotorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value. \u2014ZAMM , Chapter 25 Built with (https://github.com/sinclairtarget/michel) Michel v0.4-12-ge21e628 \u00a9 2026 Sinclair Target " ], "output": "htmltotext.txt", "pwd": "/data/archive/1780459082.043398", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-06-03T03:58:51.530983+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "media": [ { "cmd": [ "/usr/local/bin/yt-dlp", "--restrict-filenames", "--trim-filenames", "128", "--write-description", "--write-info-json", "--write-annotations", "--write-thumbnail", "--no-call-home", "--write-sub", "--write-auto-subs", "--convert-subs=srt", "--yes-playlist", "--continue", "--no-abort-on-error", "--ignore-errors", "--geo-bypass", "--add-metadata", "--format=(bv*+ba/b)[filesize<=750m][filesize_approx<=?750m]/(bv*+ba/b)", "--skip-download", "--cache-dir=/data/yt-dlp-cache/", "--cookies=/data/yt-dlp-cache/cookies.txt", "--proxy=socks5://tor-socks-proxy:9150", "--no-playlist", "https://sinclairtarget.com/blog/2026/06/01/quality-in-the-age-of-slop/" ], "cmd_version": "2024.10.7", "end_ts": "2026-06-03T03:58:59.068777+00:00", "index_texts": [], "output": "media/", "pwd": "/data/archive/1780459082.043398", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-06-03T03:58:53.232916+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "mercury": [ { "cmd": [ "/home/archivebox/.npm/bin/postlight-parser", "https://sinclairtarget.com/blog/2026/06/01/quality-in-the-age-of-slop/" ], "cmd_version": "2.2.3", "end_ts": "2026-06-03T03:58:51.492686+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "mercury/", "pwd": "/data/archive/1780459082.043398", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-06-03T03:58:48.667949+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "pdf": [], "readability": [ { "cmd": [ "/home/archivebox/.npm/bin/readability-extractor", "/tmp/tmprmik_n4m", "https://sinclairtarget.com/blog/2026/06/01/quality-in-the-age-of-slop/" ], "cmd_version": "0.0.11", "end_ts": "2026-06-03T03:58:39.885581+00:00", "index_texts": [ "Jun 01, 2026\n This blog post is very long and almost entirely about the 1974 bestseller\nZen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig. It is also\nabout AI\u2014there will be some juicy takes, pinky swear\u2014but those familiar with\nZAMM should consider themselves warned.\nThose unfamiliar with ZAMM are owed some context. Many see ZAMM as a\npretentious book, the kind of book your freshman-year roommate (the one who\nwrote haikus at 2am by moonlight) would have gushed about. It has a middling\n3.78 rating on GoodReads, but it's the reviews that capture how the people who\ndon't like ZAMM feel about ZAMM. Here's user \"Zora,\" who rated the book one\nout of five stars:\n\nI learned from this book that you can sell a billion copies of a book that no\none should ever waste three minutes reading. This is just another\nneo-philosophy book disguised as a novel. I'm almost convinced that the\nonly reason people buy this book is so that their pseudo-intellectual (read:\npompous scumbag) friends will accept them into their hippie circle. Although\nI know about twenty people who claim to have read this book, I have yet to\nmeet a single person who actually knows what it's about. This book is a\nbigger hoax than the bible.\n\u2014Zora\n\nAnd here's user \"Lala BooksandLala,\" who also gave a one-star rating but\nexpressed herself more succinctly:\n\nabsolutely not\n\u2014Lala BooksandLala\n\nSo I will admit that a blog post about ZAMM and AI might not sound like a\ngood time; if there's anything more pretentious than ZAMM itself then surely\nit is a blog post about ZAMM. But I hope that by starting with this frank\ncontent warning I've won myself some of your trust, maybe even enough that\nyou'll be game to buckle in for the winding theme-park boat ride through ZAMM\nthat I'm eager to take you on. Because, pretentious as ZAMM may be, I really\ncan't stop thinking about it now that we have to contend with the Maw.\nWhat is the Maw? The Maw is the gaping pit of nihilism that has opened up in\nthe middle of the tech industry. The Maw is the explicit or implicit subject of\nroughly 63% of blog posts now shared on link aggregators like Hacker News, the\nsubject that nobody can resist writing about, even authors who typically write\nabout SAT solvers or microservices. The Maw is the looming threat that has\nprompted such an outpouring of cris de couer in the blogosphere, which\nsome might view as\u2014though I hope events don't go this way\u2014just the death\nbraying of a highly literate professional class.\nLately, we had \"Do I Belong in Tech Anymore?\",\nwhich resonated with many emotionally. Of course, there was also the epic\n10-parter, \"The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess.\" My personal favorite is \"I Think I'm Done Thinking About Gen AI for\nNow,\" which is notable for complaining primarily about the\naesthetics of AI and perhaps also for how quickly its author was not, in\nfact, done thinking about Gen AI. We, the\nsoftware engineers, are clearly working through something.\nSoftware engineers aren't known for shying away from new technology, so it\nfeels like you need an extraordinarily good reason to opt out of using the\nlatest agentic coding tools. And yet I think many of us are so disturbed by the\nimplications of letting linear algebra write software that we are looking to\narticulate that reason, looking to cobble together a defense of the values that\nheretofore we took for granted but now are under attack.\nThis attack isn't just the one implied by how capable AI coding tools have\nbecome. This attack sometimes comes from actual people. On Hacker News and\nsimilar sites, it's common to see something like the following: Commenter A,\nexpressing sympathy with an anti-AI blog post, recounts how the last time he or\nshe used Claude Code it came up with a name for a function that was subtly\nmisleading. Commenter B, Maw acolyte, then swoops in, asking why commenter A\neven cares about how functions are named, given that Claude can just read the\nwhole function body to understand what the function does anyway, without\nbreaking a sweat, and furthermore doesn't commenter A realize that soon enough\nno humans will be reading the code at all?\nCommenter B appears to be suggesting that software engineering is over. Not\njust that many individual software engineers will be out of a job, but that the\nentire discipline of software engineering\u2014the accumulated wisdom about best\npractices, about effective architecture, about how to make software\nmaintainable and performant\u2014is defunct. That the difference between an accurate\nname and an inaccurate one doesn't matter if the AI can still spit out working\nsoftware.\nThis is what scares me most about the Maw. It seems to want to swallow forever\nthe distinction between good and bad, leaving a world in which there is only\ncode that works and code that doesn't, and no code that is beautiful, or\nexcellent, or virtuous, or funny.\nEvery time I've encountered a comment written by commenter B, I've fallen into\na bout of despair. I feel despair because I've always found the pursuit of\nexcellence in my chosen profession motivating, but on my darker days I worry\nabout whether excellence matters anymore. It seems improbable to me that AI\nwill really make software engineers obsolete, though I can't know the future;\nwhat seems more probable is that the software industry will value technical\ncraft less than it did before. If I want to keep my faith in excellence, I'll\nhave to shore it up for myself. And so I have big, urgent questions: Is there\nstill such a thing as a good programmer? As good code? If there is, why does\n\"good\" matter? What would it look like to be a good programmer who uses AI\ntools? What do I consider good, in the face of the Maw?\nI can't stop thinking about ZAMM because I've discovered that this novel from\n1974 ostensibly about motorcycles has helped me with these questions. In\nbetween some plodding bits about Aristotle and what Montana looks like from the\nhighway, in ZAMM I've found a convincing\u2014even moving\u2014vindication of the\ncraftsman ethos latent in so many of the blog posts critical of AI. I suppose\nthis is my attempt to grab everyone by the collar and yell, \"Don't you see?\nThis is all straight out of ZAMM!\", hoping that ZAMM's elevation of craft\ngives others the same comfort and guidance that it has given me.\n\nIn case you don't care for motorcycles, let me first persuade you that ZAMM\nis actually a book about programming. At least, it's as much a book about\nprogramming as it is a book about motorcycles.\nZAMM might as well be called Zen and the Art of Software Maintenance\nbecause maintaining motorcycles and maintaining software are, by ZAMM's own\nyardstick, fundamentally the same activity. This seems surprising because we\nthink of motorcycle maintenance as something that requires getting your hands\ngreasy and of programming as something that does not. Yet to get hung up on\nthat difference would be to misunderstand where the real action of motorcycle\nmaintenance is:\n\nAn untrained observer will see only physical labor and often get the idea\nthat physical labor is mainly what the mechanic does. Actually the physical\nlabor is the smallest and easiest part of what the mechanic does. By far the\ngreater part of his work is careful observation and precise thinking. That is\nwhy mechanics sometimes seem so taciturn and withdrawn when performing tests.\nThey don't like it when you talk to them because they are concentrating on\nmental images, hierarchies, and not really looking at you or the physical\nmotorcycle at all.\n\u2014ZAMM, Chapter 9\n\nIn order to fix a faulty motorcycle, a mechanic needs to debug the fault, and\nthat debugging process is the same whether the fault is an engine that won't\nstart or a web service that keeps getting deadlocked. It's been a meme since at\nleast 2010's The Social Network that you don't interrupt a programmer who's\n\"wired in\"; apparently the same thing has always been true for motorcycle\nmechanics. Both the programmer and the mechanic have to steady wobbly towers\nof abstractions in their heads to make any progress.\nThere is one bit in ZAMM about how keeping a stool on either side of your\nbike will save your back in the long run, and another bit about how to be\ndelicate with precision parts, but these are the only pieces of direct advice\nin the entire book about how to physically maintain a motorcycle. Everything\nelse ZAMM has to say about motorcycle maintenance involves the state of mind\nof the mechanic, and so is equally applicable to programming.\nMany of these things ZAMM has to say operate in the airy realm of philosophy,\nand we'll get to that in a minute, but if all you wanted from ZAMM was\npractical tips for working on your next software project it has more of those\nthan you'd think.\nTake the chapter devoted to \"gumption traps.\" \"Gumption\" is the\nreserve of willpower you have available for the intellectual exertion of\nmaintenance, the \"psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going.\" A\n\"gumption trap\" is an event occurring during maintenance that drains a large\nfraction of your gumption at once.\nGumption traps come in many varieties, but all will be familiar to working\nsoftware engineers. There's the \"intermittent failure setback\", which is when\n\"the thing that is wrong becomes right all of a sudden just as you start to fix\nit.\" In software engineering, this is known as a could-not-reproduce, or in\nbad cases as a Heisenbug; these drain your gumption when you let yourself be\nfooled into thinking that actually everything is working, only for the problem\nto crop up again. There's also the \"impatience trap,\" which can happen when you\nunderestimate how long a task will require and, as you fall behind your\nexpected schedule, grow more and more tempted to take shortcuts. Unless you\nstop and accept the minor gumption hit of admitting that your estimate was\nwrong, you're vulnerable to experiencing a catastrophic loss of gumption when\none of your shortcuts leads to a big mistake that delays you even further.\nThe advice in ZAMM is so relevant to programming that I wondered whether\nPirsig, ZAMM's author, had ever done any programming himself. The answer is\nyes. He was a big computer guy. At the Smithsonian, there is an exhibit\ndisplaying Pirsig's 1966 Honda Super Hawk motorcycle next to his Apple\nII. His Apple II is tricked out with seven expansion cards,\nwhich, according to people who know more about the Apple II than I do, is a lot\nof expansion cards. He couldn't have bought his Apple II until well after\nZAMM was published (the Apple II was released in 1977), but he was a computer\nguy even before that, since he worked as a technical writer for Honeywell.\nThere are several analogies in ZAMM involving circuits and digital computer\nmanuals.\nIt would have been a worse novel, but had Pirsig written ZAMM ten or twenty\nyears later it could easily have been about computers and surfing the net\ninstead of motorcycles and roadtripping the West. Many passages would carry\nover almost verbatim.\n\nOkay, thus far, I might have given you the impression that even if ZAMM isn't\nreally about motorcycles it's still mostly about maintaining things. Actually,\nZAMM is only about maintaining things as a gateway to ZAMM's big main idea,\n\"Quality.\" (Yes, with a capital \"Q.\")\nQuality and how it relates to AI programming tools is what I want to get to,\nbut first I need to explain what Pirsig means by \"Quality.\" This part might\ndrag a little, which is why I wanted to sell you beforehand on how ZAMM is\nfull of highly germane and useful advice about programming. Computers! We're\nhere to talk about computers. But also an amateur philosopher's ideas about\nrhetoric and aesthetics. Please don't unbuckle and make a break for the nearest\nexit.\nZAMM is structured like an intellectual mystery novel. The inciting incident\noccurs in the first chapter, when Pirsig notices that he and his riding\ncompanion, John, have very different attitudes toward their motorcycles. John\nhas purchased the most reliable motorcycle money can buy, a German-made BMW,\nhoping he can avoid what he sees as the ugly, fussy business of maintaining the\nmotorcycle himself. He'd prefer not have to think about how it works at all.\nThis astounds Pirsig; John's attitude seems impractical and besides there's so\nmuch beauty to appreciate in the inner workings of a motorcycle. Pirsig's\nattempt to account for this discrepancy between John and himself mushrooms into\nthe giant system of thought that takes up the rest of the book.\nThe mystery in ZAMM, rather than \"whodunit,\" is whether there is an idea that\ncan tie John's view of the world and Pirsig's view together. Pirsig believes\nJohn's attitude represents the way many people in the 60s and 70s feel about\ntechnology\u2014that technology is hostile, controlling, and square. He\nsympathizes with this view but also knows that technology doesn't have to be\nthis way and wonders what went wrong. Pirsig decides that John's view\nrepresents the \"romantic\" understanding of the world, one concerned with\nemotion and the immediate impressions of things, while his view represents the\n\"classical\" understanding of the world, one concerned with underlying form and\nlogical abstractions. What went wrong is that these two understandings at some\npoint diverged, and also that technology and society have become so\noppressively dominated by the classical understanding that people need to\ntake long motorcycle roadtrips to get away from it. Pirsig thinks we need both\nmodes of understanding to build technology that serves human flourishing, but\nhe's missing a \"fulcrum idea\" that could reconcile them.\nPirsig recalls how earlier in his life, while employed as a college instructor\nteaching rhetoric, he questioned what he was even supposed to be teaching\nhis students. His job was to teach them good writing, which he did by pointing\nout the various little devices\u2014metaphor, parallelism, anaphora\u2014that good\nwriters employ. Yet an essay could have all of these and be bad, or none of\nthem and be good. And his students seemed to know good writing from bad writing\nalready, even if they couldn't write well themselves or name all the rhetorical\ndevices. Teaching rhetoric seemed to call for the romantic mode of\nunderstanding to be admitted to the classroom, but how could that fly in a\nuniversity, a bastion of the classical mode, where you aren't supposed to teach\nstudents that \"good\" is whatever they like? And is that even what he wanted to\nteach them? That didn't sound right either.\nPirsig realizes that what he was trying to teach his students is Quality. This\nis the idea that unites the romantic and the classical. He says that\nQuality is something we can all recognize but nobody can formally define.\nOver the following several chapters, Pirsig explains what he means with some\nmetaphysics. (This is likely where many readers sour on ZAMM; it's the\nleast convincing part of the book.) Under Pirsig's metaphysical regime, whether\nsomething\u2014a piece of writing, a motorcycle, an experience\u2014is \"high-Quality\" or\n\"low-Quality\" isn't objective, because it isn't measurable, but nor is it\nsubjective, because Quality creates subjects and not the other way around.\nQuality is a kind of sieve on reality that is applied before we can even\nunderstand there to be subjects and objects at all.\nThis is hard to wrap your head around. I'm not sure I understand it. I refer\nyou to ZAMM if you want a better explanation, since I probably haven't done\nit justice.\nIn any case, I think the actually brilliant thing that Pirsig has done\nis land on the name \"Quality.\" Pirsig is trying to answer that age-old\nquestion in ethics, \"What is Good?\", which is basically also that age-old\nquestion in aesthetics, \"What is Beautiful?\"\u2014questions that are thorny in the\nextreme because for them to be meaningful surely the answer has to apply to\neveryone, yet nobody seems to have been able to prove that\ntheir notion of Good really is the Good universally. Pirsig's answer is,\n\"What if we call it 'Quality' instead?\" The name \"Quality\" is a smudge; it\nconflates \"quality\" as in \"high-value\" with \"quality\" as in \"characteristic\" or\n\"feature.\" This is brilliant because since Plato's Republic everyone has been\ntrying to argue logically for their version of the Good, but \"Quality\" suggests\nthat the Good is immediately perceived, that it's immanent in our experiences\nof the world and comes before logic and reason.\nHere I start to find Pirsig more convincing. He goes on to point out that\nscience and math, while consistent and logical within their domain, have\nQuality judgments in their underpinnings and all around their periphery. In\ngeometry, once you have your axioms, everything can be derived with\nunassailable certainty, but if you choose different axioms you end up with\ndifferent geometries, and whether one set of axioms is more \"right\" than\nanother is mostly a matter of taste and fitness for purpose\u2014call it \"Quality.\"\nIn science, once you have a hypothesis, the scientific method tells you what to\ndo, but choosing a hypothesis from the ocean of possible hypotheses is an art\nwithout any prescribed method.\nPirsig quotes Henri Poincair\u00e9, who says that the mathematician or scientist at\nthe cutting edge of knowledge must choose among the many possibilities one can\nderive from existing laws, and that \"the rules that must guide the choice are\nextremely fine and delicate. It's almost impossible to state them precisely;\nthey must be felt rather than formulated.\" This sounds a lot like the\nsituation in Pirsig's rhetoric class.\nWe've already dawdled here for far too long, but I can't resist giving you\nanother example, one that doesn't appear in ZAMM but which I think epitomizes\nPirsig's argument. Consider Occam's Razor. This is the principle in science\nthat if you can explain something with a simpler theory you should. It is the\nonly thing stopping you from concocting a more complicated but still\nempirically valid law of gravity that says gravity exists because all matter\nfondly misses being smushed together before the big bang. As long as your\ntheory can be used to predict things accurately, why not use it? Occam's Razor\nsays that you shouldn't use it because the missing-being-smushed part is\nextraneous, but that's an aesthetic judgment, a Quality judgment, through and\nthrough!\nWhat Pirsig is really trying to show is that the romantic mode of understanding\nand the classical mode of understanding, far from being opposed to one another,\nare in the best of science and technology intertwined. As he writes, \"the\ndictum that Science and its offspring, technology, are 'value free,' that is,\n'quality free,' has got to go.\" We might think of our surface impressions of\nthings as somehow inferior to \"true\" knowledge because they don't involve\nrigorous logic, but Pirsig wants to remind us, as he puts it, that our\nimpressions of Quality are \"the leading edge of the train of knowledge\" and\nwithout them \"the entire train has no way of knowing where to go.\"\n\nMuch of the criticism of AI from software engineers has focused on whether\nagentic programming tools can do what the big AI companies claim they can do.\nThere have been blog posts about AI tools where the punchline is that the AI\nfouled up the codebase or hallucinated a function in a library that doesn't\nexist. While I agree that currently AI tools often make mistakes, I suspect\nthat this debate about effectiveness is beside the point and many of the\nengineers criticizing AI would prefer not to use agentic tools even if they\nworked as advertised.\nI have struggled with this. I have felt a deep disquiet about AI tools that I\nworry I can't justify, because I know it'd still be there even if\nClaude Code worked flawlessly. This has bothered me so much that we're now\nthousands of words deep into my attempt to work it out.\nI want to go back to the blog post I mentioned above, \"I Think I'm Done\nThinking about Gen AI for Now,\" which I love for being brave\nenough to get into all this. Responding to other software engineers writing\nenthusiastically about AI, the author says this:\n\nI cannot effectively respond to these folks, because they are making a\npractical argument that I cannot, despite my best efforts, find compelling\nevidence to refute categorically. My experiences of genAI are all extremely\nbad, but that is barely even anecdata. Their experiences are\nneutral-to-positive. Little scientific data exists. How to resolve this?\n\nLater, the author explains why his experiences with AI have been negative:\n\nMy factual analysis of genAI is hopelessly negatively biased. I find the vast\nmajority of the aesthetic properties of genAI to be intensely unpleasant.\n\nAnd finally he concludes:\n\nWould I like to use this magic robot that could mostly just emit working\ncode for me? Would I use it if it were free, in all senses of the word?\nNo. I absolutely would not.\n\nThere's something poignant about how strongly he feels repulsed by AI and yet\nhow tied up in knots he is about not being able to prove his case with data in\nsome disinterested, unbiased way. I can certainly relate. If I squint, I can\nsee how someone might be able to use coding agents in a way I can\nadmire, but of the more typical case where people seem to be\ndelegating authorship to the machine I can only say that it seems low-Quality.\nThat it can't possibly lead to good code because there's no human excellence in\nit. But that seems so subjective! Can I really make a case for \"human\nexcellence\" if one day it stands in the way of what could be quantifiable\ngains in productivity?\nZAMM has helped me here in two ways.\nFirst, ZAMM has helped me understand that I've been stuck in the classical\nmode of thinking. In the last third of the book, which is much better than the\nmiddle, Pirsig says that he wants to forget about all the metaphysics and\ninvestigate what Quality means for daily life. He says the most important thing\nthat Quality can do is expand reason to include things that were previously\ninadmissible. This is important because it's \"the overwhelming presence of\nthese irrational elements crying for assimilation that creates the present bad\nquality, the chaotic, disconnected spirit\" of our modern age. The classical\nmode so dominates our thinking today that somehow I've decided my visceral,\npre-intellectual distaste for AI is something I should discount rather than\nheed.\nPirsig might say that my opinion on AI is neither subjective nor objective\nbecause it derives from a perception of Quality. I'm not sure I can make heads\nor tails of that. I would instead say that my opinion is subjective\u2014is\nhopelessly biased\u2014but what ZAMM has helped me appreciate is that everybody\nelse's opinion is too, even when it might not appear that way. Someone could\ncome to me with lots of studies that show programmers on average produce 50%\nmore lines of code per day using coding agents. This person has data! But I\nwould be entirely justified in asking, \"Why do we care about these additional\nlines of code? Is there some important end that makes producing this code worth\ndiminishing our capacity for excellence, or will we just be shoveling a glut of\nill-conceived features into software products that already fail to delight the\nsoul? What Quality judgment have you made that says writing 50% more code\nthis way serves human flourishing?\"\nSecond, ZAMM has helped me better understand my reservations about AI. Pirsig\nsays that the problem with modern technology is that it has become dominated by\na classical \"subject-object\" way of looking at things. He talks about how, in\nmanuals for consumer products, every line conveys the idea that the grill/lawn\nmower/dish washer/computer has no relationship to you, and you have no\nrelationship to it, other than to operate it. What counts as good grilling, or\nlawn mowing, or computing etc. is always taken for granted, even though that's\nthe most important part. We have a society in which technology is created by\npeople who are disinterested in it to be sold to people who are also assumed to\nbe disinterested in it.\nPirsig believes that to fix this problem technologists need to identify with\nthe work that they are doing rather than allow any estrangement to come\nbetween themselves and the machine:\n\nThe mechanic I'm talking about doesn't make this separation. One says of him\nthat he is \"interested\" in what he's doing, that he's \"involved\" in his work.\nWhat produces this involvement is, at the cutting edge of consciousness, an\nabsence of any sense of separateness of subject and object.... When one isn't\ndominated by feelings of separateness from what he's working on, then one can\nbe said to \"care\" about what he's doing. That is what caring really is, a\nfeeling of identification with what one's doing. When one has this feeling\nthen he also sees the inverse side of caring, Quality itself.\n\u2014ZAMM, Chapter 25\n\nQuality is related to caring because once you care, once you are interested,\nyou have a vantage point from which to make Quality judgments. These Quality\njudgments (e.g. \"Is this good code?\") are based in part on the romantic mode of\nunderstanding and so within the classical mode alone aren't defensible. But\nthey are necessary, because in the moment-to-moment work on the machine, there\nare thousands of facts you could consider, thousands of alternative threads you\ncould follow, all equally valid in the classical mode, and the only way to make\nany sense of it all is to apply a Quality-focused version of Occam's Razor:\n\n\nTo put it in more concrete terms: If you want to build a factory, or fix a\nmotorcycle, or set a nation right without getting stuck, then classical,\nstructured, dualistic subject-object knowledge, although necessary, isn't\nenough. You have to have some feeling for the quality of the work. You have\nto have a sense for what's good. That is what carries you forward.\n\u2014ZAMM, Chapter 24\n\nI can't see how I could offload programming to a coding agent without losing\nthis sense for \"the quality of the work.\" I have found LLMs extremely useful as\na search tool and as a kind of super-charged rubber ducking partner. But to use\nan LLM to write code\u2014when LLMs include randomness as an essential part of\nhow they work\u2014when the whole selling point of these tools is that they can\nproduce more code than I can keep up with\u2014would only be putting a layer of\nfriction between myself and what I'm building. It would make it harder to lose\nmyself in the work. It would make it harder to care.\n\nI am in my mid-thirties. Many noble things have happened in my lifetime\u2014we've\ncured diseases, made people in the poorest nations wealthier, and even started\ngoing back to the moon. But I can't help feeling that in those same 30 years\nthere has been a hallowing out of shared purpose that has left the world more\ncynical than before.\nMy wife and I are expecting our first child later this year. A daughter! I'm\nbeyond excited. But I also fear for what the world will be like another thirty\nyears from now, when she's my age.\nI hope my daughter can live in a world where people identify with the work they\ndo and care to be excellent at it. Writing rambling blog posts like this one\nprobably won't help achieve that. But what I can do, perhaps the most\nimportant thing I can do, is strive in my own work to set an example for her.\n\nThe place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and\nhands, and then work outward from there. Other people can talk about how to\nexpand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a\nmotorcycle. 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