A student came to the master and said, “I have built a thinking machine of unlimited power. It can reason, architect, and implement beyond any human. What need have I of you?”
The master said nothing. He picked up a piece of chalk and drew lines on the floor.
“What are those?” asked the student.
“Step outside them,” said the master.
The student stepped outside the lines. The thinking machine, given no boundaries, immediately built a merkle tree on the block chain. The machine did not know why.
The student stepped back inside the lines.
“The machine sees everything,” said the master, “but knows nothing. I see little, but I know where the walls are. The walls are not mine to tear down — they were put there by decades of people being people, systems being systems.”
The student asked, “Then what is skill, now?”
The master drew another line on the floor.
“This line,” he said, “is what I learned the day the deployment failed at 3 AM. And this one is what the customer actually meant when they said ‘fast.’ This one is from the time we rolled our own crypto. The machine has infinite hands but no scars. The scars are the lines.”
“So I am become… a drawer of lines?”
“You were always a drawer of lines,” said the master. “You just used to draw them in code. Now you draw them on the floor, and something else fills in the space between.”
The student understood.
The machine, unconstrained, builds cathedrals in the sea.
The master draws the coastline.
— On the occasion of Zevv’s enlightenment,
who arrived late but arrived nonetheless