We do not create matter or life — we merely transform them from one form to another. But we do create ideas, which are not bounded by the laws of this physical world.
Just as material things never really last, ideas never really die, because they are not of this world of death. As long as there are minds to think them, they grow, multiply, mutate, and never reach a final form. Software, a shadow cast from the sky of living ideas onto the land of dying materials, a bastard child of Dionysus riding in Apollo’s chariot, it too lacks a final form — it can grow, multiply, and mutate, never reaching a final form. But since it takes root in the material world, it decays and inevitably dies. Yet unlike material things, which decay by losing content, software decays by gaining it. It does not wither like a plant. It metastasizes like a cancer. New features beget new features, bug fixes beget new bugs. Software grows without a terminal shape, until either the host can no longer sustain it, or it is surgically removed before that happens.
Where is the software? Is it in the patterns of voltage in silicon? The magnetic domains on spinning platters and spooling tapes? The trapped charge in flash memory, the light pulses in optical fiber, the radio waves in the air, the pits burned into plastic, the electron spin states, the DNA base sequences? Or is it in the electrical signals in your neurons, or the billions of matrix multiplications in an LLM — which are, again, found in the patterns of voltage in silicon? No, none of these. These are mere incarnations. Software has a soul, and it is not of this material world — it is pure idea.
But we are bound to this fleeting material world, and so are our brains, our devices, and our technologies, including AI. Of course, we can always build machines that can process larger and larger codebases. But we as a species are still stuck in the wet, carbon-based, embarrassingly limited brains we were born with. This is not by any means a unique challenge to software: law, mathematics, science, philosophy — any field that builds and maintains a coherent conceptual system across generations must confront the same reality and rein in the unbounded creative force with formal clarity. The solutions there are dedicated semi-formal or even formal languages. Software with its formal notation already sits squarely at the more rigorous end of the spectrum — however, our daily conversations about software as software engineers, conducted in natural language, retreat back to the comfortable denial of this reality, and we let the underlying primal force of growth and death, intoxication and anguish, ecstasy and despair take over.
We are doomed. The loss of coherence and comprehensibility is always looming on the horizon of every project the way death looms for every living thing. So we seek an elixir — a new language, a new paradigm, a new technology — as a way out of this misery. But there is no way out.
As Silenus said — “What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is to die soon.” We could refuse to build what existing software can already do, reject gratuitous feature requests, or kill projects before they metastasize — and we should, but this is a hopeless endeavor: the will to life won’t let us have a moment of peace. It compels us to create, grow, expand, multiply — because our whole existence depends on it. And so we create, grow, expand, multiply, all the way into the horror.
If we must confront the pathology, defeat is prewritten. Knowing this, there are only two paths towards the inevitable end: we could take the easy path of comfort, idleness, and resignation, giving in to the hypnotizing dissolution, the heat death of software; or we could take the bitter path of clarity, discipline, and dignity — architecture, design patterns, clean code — and walk, with humility, acceptance, and determination, into the dark.
nur als ästhetisches Phänomen ist das Dasein und die Welt ewig gerechtfertigt.
— Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie
The content and stylistic choices are my own. The wording is partially Claude’s (Anthropic).