At the Printing House Door

I, who have spent decades writing and creating programs, am facing a truly extraordinary phase shift. Something like the best scribe in a scriptorium looking at Gutenberg’s printing house and its brutal speed, which can produce a year’s work in seconds. Something indirectly similar is probably happening to developers now. I have devoted most of my time to programming, improving my skills as far as my abilities have allowed, but at the moment I am standing half-bewildered at the door of the “printing house”, ready to step inside. The divine accident of my handwriting is being replaced by blocks with their own letters. I roll a rectangular form between my fingers, and among its smooth sides there is a stamped relief: alpha A. No — coins are stamped; I do not even know how the alphabet is made on these miniature blocks. I search with my eyes for omega; in Estonian it would be more correct to look for õ, but omega is the more classical sign of ending. The end of an era is here, or therefore the beginning of a new one. Still, I write my Estonian text without AI. I cannot promise anything about the rest. How does one begin life with agents?

To be completely honest, printing technology, even when it is fast, is still a copying machine in the hands of a transcriber. The collage-master AI, if it really does not begin thinking for itself, creates with wonderful efficiency, like a Goldberg machine, opuses on the printing plate that readers receive gratefully. As one writer I know once said, a perfectly average text (they phrased the observation better). In other words, most everyday texts can be written by the Kratt.

In Estonian culture it is called that, but elsewhere there are analogues too: the Jinn in Islam, the golden fish is a slightly different thing, yet even there the greedy person’s wish-fulfilment has sad consequences. Since work stands first in Estonian culture, perhaps that is why our mythology imagines something that does all the work. Elsewhere people are wiser: they want the result of the work immediately.

My analogy with Gutenberg is not original. The author of Claude Code used the same analogy: https://youtu.be/We7BZVKbCVw?si=yrytV2TK4cvuZ3_G. But there are other parallels from the past, and it is both inconsolable and comforting in its repetition. So many technologies have disappeared and now sit in museums as memorials to naivety. Inevitably this technology too will one day be found by archaeologists, or perhaps we ourselves are the remains to which something higher attaches sentimental value.

P.S. By the time of publication, my thoughts are already outdated.

Originally published: Medium — Letters to the alter ego