long, human authored
The [markdownlang] post is a multi-layered satirical self reflection about labour disposability:
- Surface level: markdownlang as a tool that I built and am probably not going to release even though I had many funny things planned around it. This is intended to satirize how programming is actually being done today and how newer people are spinning up to the profession. There is self-reflective questioning of "is this really going to be the new layer of abstraction"?
- Middle layer: industry critique about what the purpose of our job really is: is our job to write the fucking code or is our job to figure out how to translate vague specifications into the layers of abstraction and clear thought required to actually make the programs happen? This is intended to reflect on various things I've run into in my career (product people that seem to understand what they think they want, but not what they actually want). Also fucking documentation always going out of date the minute you write it. Fuck that noise. The core point here is to point out how fucking magic the UX of just saying "make it purple" and it making it purple is.
- Core layer: as a workforce our labour is now disposable because any product person with a dream and a claude max subscription can now say "make the user's icon have party streamers when it's their birthday". I demonstrate the horror with the reveal that markdownlang was not authored by human hands, and was instead fed into a loop of claudes code with an API key to a self hosted model so that it could create a spec, iterate on it, discover flaws, remediate them, implement those remediations, and continue until the end result works.
"I love this idea of programming as description, but I hate how something like this will be treated by the market should it be widely released."
This is the core thesis statement. This is the big kahuna in terms of messaging. The horror is that "good enough" is becoming good enough.
As an added note, at the end of the post I mention that it was authored in the voice of one of my blog personae, specifically the one that does heavily unmarked shitposting but genuinely means well and wants people to improve. This means that my authorial voice is delegated to a character, intended to mirror the themes of abstraction, replacement, and disposability.