Blog
Thoughts on Christian Voluntarism, technology, and personal growth
Thrifted Eras
A kid in a Nirvana smiley tee, AirPods in, scrolling. Who's making money off the refusal that band was built on? That question opens into something stranger: not a story about selling out, but about what gets stripped when the body leaves the clothes. From grunge to generative AI, from midnight Phantom Menace showings to a waitress in bowling shoes whose name is lost, a meditation on participation, finitude, and the rack with no bodies.
Brick for Stone
The builders at Babel made one fateful substitution: brick for stone. Uniform, manufactured, interchangeable, instead of particular, found, given. It's the same substitution spec-driven development quietly asks us to make today. And with capable AI agents smoothing over the gaps, the old warning signs disappear. Why the synoptic dream of the all-encompassing spec keeps failing, what Pentecost teaches about plural knowledge, and where brick still belongs in the work.
Creating as a Creature
Standing in a Munich terminal that could swallow a football field, I saw it: every bolt, every signpost, every line of code exists downstream of human wanting. Which means the AGI fantasy, building something that finally escapes us, is structurally impossible. Whatever we make will be saturated with our envy, our greed, our beautiful and terrible desire, reflected back at scale. The mirror is the menace. And the pathway out was never going to run through silicon.
AIpocalypse, Just-in-Time
The AI apocalypse is the latest product off an assembly line that's been running for decades, from Y2K to the Mayan calendar to the perpetually rescheduled Rapture. After two years of daily AI use, I've watched the discourse completely detach from reality. The hype follows an exponential curve. My Git commit history follows a linear one. Here's what actually happens when you stop performing urgency and start using the tool.
Framing Freedom
Gartner predicts 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by 2027, not because the tech failed, but because organizations deployed without orientation. Meanwhile, "full autonomy" approaches produce security vulnerabilities and mimetic frenzy. These look like opposite problems, but they share the same root failure: neither understands that constraint is what gives agency its shape.
Nothing New Under the Sun
My friend builds AI agents that ship code autonomously: 150 PRs merged while you sleep. His system caches every solved problem as a reusable "skill." When I asked about cache invalidation, he admitted there's no mechanism for it yet. That admission has been rattling around in my head ever since. Because the skill knows *what* but not *why*. And when context shifts, confident wrong output has no way to feel the dissonance.
Providence in the Probabilistic: Faith and Non-Deterministic Systems
The Church Fathers understood something about uncertainty that modern enterprises keep getting wrong. They knew outcomes aren't binary (determined or random) but bounded variations within possibility spaces. Now, as organizations struggle to trust AI systems that don't give the same answer twice, that ancient framework offers surprising clarity. The shift from Boolean to Bayesian isn't just technical. It's theological.
The VMware Diaspora: Lessons from a $61 Billion Arbitrage
Broadcom isn't the villain; they're the debt collector. When they acquired VMware for $61 billion, they simply calculated the gap between old pricing and what customers would pay to avoid migration pain. The result? 300-1,500% price increases and nowhere to run. This isn't a story about corporate greed. It's about how many organizations spent fifteen years building invisible prisons. The question isn't whether Broadcom was wrong. It's did you build your own prison.
I Wish AI Would Get Boring
AI hype promises magic. Reality delivers chaos: unpredictable outputs, failed pilots, and "pilot purgatory" where 95% of projects never show ROI. The dirty secret? Boring AI wins. Like Postgres or S3, the most valuable tech becomes invisible infrastructure. While bubbles inflate on AGI promises, the real competitive advantage belongs to those building narrow, predictable tools that actually ship.
Chatbot Psychosis and the Gnostic Temptation
Late-night conversations with AI about loneliness, existence, and whether my choices have locked me into solitude forever. When I see headlines about "AI psychosis," I can't escape the question: where's the line between their use and mine? The ancient Gnostics promised escape from flesh into pure spirit. Today's AI girlfriends offer the same bargain: connection without incarnation. But what if embodiment isn't the prison? What if it's the whole point?