What this page is

This is the long version of The Cost of Discovery. That essay asks one question. Why does a poem have a level in a Chinese vertical drama, and why did it look familiar to me? This page is everything the question touched.

It has three pillars. Stories. Computer games. Physical games. Then the places where they cross.

Every entry carries a tag.

[D] Documented. The fact is on record. Where the entry claims an influence, somebody involved said so, or historians agree.

[P] Parallel. The same shape in two places. No proven line between them.

Anything I could not source is not here. One rule decided the rest. A dot stays only if it shows a new crossing or a new kind of link.

This is the first Insanecyclopedia. There will be others. Some of it makes sense. Some of it may not. That is what it is all about.

Insanecyclopedia No.1 Map

This is part of a book I’m writing in the open, AI Has No Morality. It Has Yours. Subscribe to get each piece as it goes out.

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The genre

短剧, duanju. Short dramas shot upright for a phone. [D]

爽文, shuangwen. Fiction built to deliver satisfaction again and again. [D]

打脸, face-slapping. The payoff scene. Someone was mocked. Now he is proved right in public, in front of the people who mocked him. [D]

穿越, chuanyue. Crossing over. A person from now wakes up in another time or another world, carrying knowledge nobody there has. [D]

The worthless prince. องค์ชายไร้ค่า in the Thai titles. The lowest son at court, who is not what he seems.

Poems with grades. In the drama I watched, a captured general tied to a tree recites Wang Changling’s 出塞, and golden light pours out of him. A Li Bai poem, the first of the 清平调, is rated grade nine. Both poems are real and both are Tang. The grading is the drama’s invention. [D] for the poems.

Knowing the future is an old trick. Mark Twain sent a man from Connecticut to King Arthur’s court in 1889. Huang Yi sent a modern soldier to the Warring States period in 寻秦记, published in the mid 1990s, and that novel is commonly named as the template for chuanyue fiction. [D] each. [P] between them.

Pillar one: story, legend, lore

China

Poetry was a rank. From 681 the Tang examination for the jinshi degree required two compositions. By the middle of the eighth century those were a poem and a rhapsody. A career turned on verse. [D]

Poets were graded. Between 513 and 518 the critic Zhong Rong wrote the 诗品, the Gradings of Poets. Three grades. About a hundred and twenty poets. All of them dead. [D]

Nine ranks. In 220 the Wei minister Chen Qun set up a system that graded candidates for office on nine steps. 九品. [D] The drama’s grade nine sits in a long shadow. [P]

Sun Wukong is slapped first. In Journey to the West, heaven gives the monkey a title. 弼马温, keeper of the horses. He is pleased with it until he learns the post is not on the rank ladder at all. He overturns the table and leaves heaven. [D] for the text. [P] for reading it as face-slapping.

He also cultivates. An old monkey dies. Wukong leaves home to find someone who can teach him not to. A patriarch teaches him seventy-two transformations and the cloud somersault. [D]

Jin Yong wrote the game before the game. Four novels, serialized in Hong Kong newspapers. The facts are documented. Reading them as game design is mine.

射雕英雄传, from 1957. Guo Jing is slow and nobody rates him. The beggar master Hong Qigong teaches him fifteen of the Eighteen Dragon-Subduing Palms, lured by Huang Rong’s cooking. The last three come later. A skill tree with quest rewards. The contest on Mount Hua ranks five masters by compass point. East Heretic, West Venom, South Emperor, North Beggar, Central Divine. A leaderboard. [D]

神雕侠侣, from 1959. The sword tomb of Dugu Qiubai. A sharp sword before twenty. A soft sword before thirty, thrown away. A heavy blunt iron sword before forty. A wooden sword after that. Then toward no sword at all. A progression chart where the top means holding less. [D]

倚天屠龙记, from 1961. Zhang Wuji cuts the 九阳真经 out of the stitched belly of a white ape. Loot. His other great technique, 乾坤大挪移, comes in seven numbered levels, and he leaves nineteen lines of the seventh unpractised. [D]

天龙八部, from 1963. Duan Yu’s 北冥神功 pulls other people’s inner power into himself. Xu Zhu, who plays Go badly, shuts his eyes and drops a stone at random to stop another man from killing himself over the board. The stone kills his own group. It opens a problem that had beaten its keeper for thirty years. Then the old master who set it pours seventy years of power into him. [D]

The road to Korea. In 1961 Kim Kwang-ju serialized 정협지 in the Kyunghyang Shinmun, adapted from a Taiwanese martial arts novel. In 1966 Wolong Sheng’s 군협지 sold so well that the genre took its name from it. 무협지. [D] From there a line runs into Korean fantasy and then game fantasy. Whether Solo Leveling owes Jin Yong anything in particular, nobody has said. [P]

僵尸, the hopping dead. Mr. Vampire, 1985, set off a run of Hong Kong jiangshi films. [D] A cousin of Dracula with no proven line between them. [P]

India

A board game decides a kingdom. In the Mahabharata, Yudhishthira sits down to dice. He loses his kingdom, his brothers, himself, and then his wife Draupadi. Those losses are cancelled. He plays again. The second stake is twelve years in the forest and a thirteenth in hiding. [D]

A weapon as a quest reward. Arjuna does penance. Shiva comes to him disguised as a hunter, fights him, and then grants him the Pashupatastra. [D]

The ones refused. Ekalavya is turned away by the teacher Drona. He makes a clay image of Drona and trains in front of it, and later pays for the teaching with his thumb. Karna is stopped at the princes’ tournament and asked for his lineage. He cannot answer. He is mocked as a charioteer’s son. [D]

A hidden stat. Hanuman is cursed as a child to forget his own powers. He has them the whole time. Before the leap to Lanka, the old bear Jambavan reminds him. [D]

The bow. Kings have failed to lift Shiva’s bow. Rama lifts it, strings it, and it snaps in the middle. [D]

Avatar. Sanskrit avatāra, the descent of a god into an earthly form. In 1985 Richard Garriott took the word for the player’s own figure in Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar. A PLATO game had already used the name in 1979, and Lucasfilm’s Habitat used it for on-screen figures in 1986. The god’s descent became your character. [D]

Hanuman and Sun Wukong. Both leap impossible distances. Both change size. Both get inside an enemy. Hanuman shrinks, enters the mouth of the serpent mother Surasa, and comes out. Wukong becomes an insect in Princess Iron Fan’s tea and is swallowed. Both have a tail that causes trouble. Hanuman’s is set on fire and he burns Lanka with it. Wukong turns himself into a shrine, and the tail he cannot hide stands behind it as a flagpole and gives him away.

There is a real road. Xuanzang’s journey to India happened. The 六度集经, translated by Kang Senghui in the third century, tells of an unnamed king whose queen is carried off and who allies with a monkey king. The monkeys build a causeway to an island. The 杂宝藏经, translated in 472, names Rama and tells his exile, with no monkeys in it. [D]

In 1923 Hu Shih argued that Wukong came from Hanuman. Lu Xun argued for a Chinese water ape called 无支祁. The usual view today is some of both. It is not settled. [D] for the debate. The link itself has no tag.

Celtic, Norse, Finnish

Three classes. Strabo names three honoured classes among the Gauls. Bards, who sang. Vates, who divined. Druids. Caesar writes that some druids trained for twenty years, memorizing verse that was deliberately never written down. [D]

The ladder was rebuilt. The eighteenth century revived the druids, through William Stukeley and Iolo Morganwg. The Ancient Order of Druids was founded in London in 1781, as a fraternal society. The Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, founded in 1964, uses those three as its grades. [D]

1781. The same year, in Paris, Court de Gébelin published the claim that tarot cards held Egyptian wisdom. Before that they were a card game. Druids and tarot were each handed a new past in the same year. Both dates are documented. Putting them side by side is ours. [P]

Satire that raises blisters. In an Irish tale the poet Néde satirizes King Caíer, and three blisters rise on the king’s face. A blemished man cannot be king. He flees. [D] for the tale. [P] as a poem with a damage value.

Three drops. Ceridwen brews a cauldron for a year and a day, for her own son. The three drops that matter land on the boy stirring it, Gwion Bach, who becomes the poet Taliesin. The earliest written version is from the sixteenth century. [D] Power meant for someone else lands on a nobody. Xu Zhu again. [P]

Flyting. A formal exchange of insults. Scholars class Beowulf’s exchange with Unferth as one. [D] A face-slap with rules. [P]

The prince who plays worthless. Around 1200 Saxo Grammaticus wrote down Amleth, a Danish prince who pretends to be mad so that he will be left alive. Through a French retelling he reached Shakespeare. In 2006 Feng Xiaogang’s 夜宴, The Banquet, moved Hamlet to a tenth-century Chinese court. [D]

Sung into a swamp. In the Kalevala, young Joukahainen challenges old Väinämöinen to a contest of songs. Väinämöinen sings him into a swamp, up to the chin. [P]

Elsewhere

Griots. West African historians, praise singers and musicians. The role is inherited. [P]

言霊, kotodama. The Japanese belief that power lives in words and names. [P]

Modern screen

The monkey chain. Dragon Ball began on 20 November 1984 as a loose Journey to the West. Son Goku is the Japanese reading of 孫悟空. In 1988 the scouter arrives, a device over one eye that reads fighting strength, 戦闘力, as a number. The first reading in the series is a farmer. He is a 5. Wukong to Goku to the power level is [D]. Hanuman to Wukong is the open question above.

Doraemon walks into the book. In the 1988 film, Doraemon’s Hero Machine lets you play inside a story, and it is loaded with Journey to the West. He uses it in Tang China and leaves the door open. The game’s monsters walk out into the real past and eat the real Xuanzang. History is rewritten. The children go back as the Journey’s own characters to repair it. [D]

JoJo. In Stardust Crusaders, from 1989, the first twenty-two Stands are named for the tarot trumps. The next nine are named for Egyptian gods. [D] Court de Gébelin’s Egypt, two centuries later. [P]

The reverse direction. Avatar: The Last Airbender, 2005, is an American cartoon. With the martial arts consultant Sifu Kisu, its makers gave each element a Chinese style. Tai chi for water. Hung Gar for earth. Northern Shaolin for fire. Baguazhang for air. The child Avatar is found by the toys he picks out of thousands, the way a reincarnated lama is found in Tibet. One episode teaches seven chakras. Western hands assembling Asian parts. [D]

Boulle. Pierre Boulle wrote Planet of the Apes in 1963. Eleven years earlier he wrote The Bridge over the River Kwai, which is Kanchanaburi. [D] The ape who rises to lead, and Hanuman’s army of monkeys. [P]

Rambo. First Blood is a 1972 novel by David Morrell. A veteran a small town dismisses turns out to be a one-man army. [D] for the book. [P] as a worthless prince.

Campbell. The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 1949. The book that says all of this is one story. [D] We did not use it. See the end.

Pillar two: computer games

The dungeon moves onto a mainframe. On the PLATO system, pedit5 and dnd were written in 1975, one year after Dungeons & Dragons. Oubliette followed in 1977. [D]

The cave. Will Crowther explored Mammoth Cave and played D&D with friends. Across 1975 and 1976 he wrote Colossal Cave Adventure. Don Woods expanded it in 1977. [D]

Zork. Begun at MIT in 1977. For a while it was called Dungeon, until the publisher of D&D objected. [D]

MUD. Roy Trubshaw began the Multi-User Dungeon at the University of Essex in 1978. Richard Bartle took it over in 1980 and gave it points and ranks. A player who reached wizard or witch became immortal, with power over the game and the mortals in it. The top level was admin rights. [D]

Diku to Azeroth. DikuMUD came from five students in Copenhagen, released in 1991. EverQuest, 1999, was shaped by its designers’ years in DikuMUDs. The design debt is documented. The code debt was denied under oath. World of Warcraft, 2004, was built by people who had played EverQuest and wanted to fix it. [D]

Korea. In July 1994 쥬라기 공원, Jurassic Park, went live as the country’s first commercial text MUD. Song Jae-kyung was one of its developers. He was then an original developer of 바람의 나라, The Kingdom of the Winds, 1996, and went on to make Lineage, 1998. Both games were adapted from Korean comics. [D]

侠客行. The hinge. In November 1995 five Chinese students abroad proposed a MUD. Fang Zhouzi wrote the design document. It went live about two months later on a server at a Canadian university. It was built on a Taiwanese code base and filled with the sects of Jin Yong’s novels. A structure that came down from D&D, holding Jin Yong’s world. The source code leaked in 1996 and clones spread. One of them, 北大侠客行, is still running. [D]

And the name. Chinese press reports that the title was borrowed from Jin Yong’s novel 侠客行. That novel is named after a poem by Li Bai. [D] for the novel and the poem. The borrowing is reported, not confirmed by a founder.

Japan takes the Western RPG. Yuji Horii was playing Wizardry and Ultima, both 1981. He combined them into Dragon Quest in 1986. Final Fantasy followed in 1987. One of its designers, Akitoshi Kawazu, said he tried to get as close to D&D as he could. It has the beholder and the mind flayer, and spells that come in a fixed number of charges per level. Final Fantasy III, 1990, let you change jobs. Their two publishers, Enix and Square, merged in 2003. [D]

The bard gets his own game. The Bard’s Tale, 1985. [D]

Dracula becomes a boss. Castlevania, 1986. The count waits at the end of a Japanese game. In D&D a vampire’s hit drains two levels from you. Stoker’s monster became a thing that eats levels. [D]

Tarot becomes friendship. Persona 3, 2006. Each friendship in the game is one of the tarot trumps. Each runs from rank 1 to rank 10. [D]

Jin Yong becomes an RPG. 金庸群侠传, 1996, from Heluo Studio in Taiwan. The player is pulled into the martial world and must collect all fourteen novels. Chuanyue, as a game. [D]

Dune. Westwood made Dune II in 1992, under the film licence, in Herbert’s universe. It set the template for real-time strategy. Patrick Wyatt, who made Warcraft, names it as the inspiration. [D]

Li Bai is playable. A StarCraft custom map called Aeon of Strife. Then Defense of the Ancients in Warcraft III, 2003. Then League of Legends, 2009. Then Tencent’s 王者荣耀, Honor of Kings, 2015. Li Bai is one of its heroes. [D]

Contra. Konami, 1987. You pick up a better gun. You lose it when you die. [D]

Tetris. Alexey Pajitnov began it in 1984 at the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ computing centre. He took it from pentominoes, the puzzle of five-square pieces. The oldest known pentomino puzzle is in Henry Dudeney’s Canterbury Puzzles, 1907. Solomon Golomb named the family in 1953. The Game Boy carried it everywhere in 1989. Its levels make the pieces fall faster and the lines score more. You do not change. [D]

Games become stories again. Korea had game fantasy novels by 1999, with 옥스타칼니스의 아이들. 달빛조각사, The Legendary Moonlight Sculptor, made the form mainstream in 2007. Solo Leveling began in 2016. Sword Art Online went online in 2002 and into print in 2009. Chinese online-game novels, 网游小说, start around 2001 to 2003. The 系统流, stories where a game-like system attaches itself to the hero, is a trend from about 2014. The word LitRPG was coined in Russia in 2013. [D]

Stories were turned into games. The games were turned back into stories. Then somebody shot one upright for a phone.

Pillar three: physical games

The chess family. Chaturanga is placed in India in the sixth century. The first clear mention is from about 625. The line from there to Persia to European chess is secure. Shogi shares the ancestor, by a route nobody can trace. [D] Xiangqi is probably related. Its origin is disputed. [P]

Three ways to rise on a board. In chess a pawn that reaches the far rank becomes another piece. In xiangqi a soldier that crosses the river gains a sideways step and stays a soldier. In shogi the piece is turned over to show its promoted face. [D]

Kinging. Draughts crowns the piece that reaches the far side. The game probably emerged in medieval France or Spain by the thirteenth century. [D] for the rule. The origin is a reconstruction.

Senet. The oldest secure picture of it is in an Egyptian tomb from about 2686 BCE. It began as an ordinary game. By the New Kingdom it was read as the soul’s passage through the afterlife. [D] A game that got its meaning later. Like tarot. [P]

Snakes and Ladders. It descends from gyan chaupar, an Indian game of virtues and vices. The oldest board that can be dated with confidence was made in Lucknow around 1780. The first commercial English version is from 1892. A ladder that is a moral. [D]

The Checkered Game of Life. Milton Bradley, 1860. Squares of virtue and vice. [D] The same idea, with no line to India that I can show. [P]

Mahjong. Nineteenth-century China. Traditional scoring counts 番, fan, and each one doubles the hand. [D]

Dan. The dan ranks of Go are credited to Hon’inbō Dōsaku in seventeenth-century Japan. Chinese Go had its own nine grades long before, and the dan ladder likely echoes them. Nine ranks again. In 1883 Kanō Jigorō borrowed dan for judo. From 1886 his dan holders wore black belts. [D] From there to the ranks and grades of manga and anime, no line is documented. [P]

Playing cards. The oldest cards anyone can prove are Chinese, from a legal case in 1294. Mamluk Egypt had suits of cups, coins, swords and polo sticks, with a king and two deputies and no queen. Cards are in Europe by the 1370s. The French suits come around 1480. The French court of king, queen and knave is a feudal ladder in the hand. [D]

Tarot. The first record is from Florence in 1440. It was a trick-taking game with a permanent ranked row of trumps. The occult story begins in 1781. [D]

From war game to character. A Prussian named Reisswitz built Kriegsspiel in 1812. His son’s 1824 version was adopted by the Prussian army. The line runs through an American version of 1880 and a 1969 game called Braunstein to Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor, 1971, which used the fantasy rules of Chainmail. Dungeons & Dragons was published in 1974. Character levels are credited to Blackmoor. How the credit divides between Arneson and Gary Gygax is argued. [D]

The bard. Doug Schwegman’s bard appeared in The Strategic Review in February 1976. He names its sources as the Norse skald, the Celtic bard, and the southern European minstrel. Its charm works through song. In the 1978 rulebook a bard must first be a fighter, then a thief, then study under druids. [D]

Seats at the top. In first-edition AD&D there are only nine druids of the twelfth level, three archdruids, and one Great Druid. If no seat is empty you must defeat a holder to advance. The loser drops a level. Monks have a similar rule. [D]

Magic to Yu-Gi-Oh. Magic: The Gathering, 1993. The Yu-Gi-Oh manga began in 1996, and the card game inside the story was called Magic & Wizards. Konami’s real card game followed in 1999. Its monsters carry level stars. The manga’s English editor says it is based on Magic. The author never said so in public. [D] with that caution.

Crossings

These are the lines that go from one pillar to another.

Norse to Tolkien to D&D. Tolkien took his dwarf names, and Gandalf, from the Old Norse Völuspá. Ent and orc are Old English words. D&D took his hobbits, ents and balrogs. In 1977 a cease-and-desist from the holder of the film rights turned them into halflings, treants and balors. [D]

Celtic bard to D&D bard to The Bard’s Tale. [D]

Kriegsspiel to Blackmoor to the MUD to 侠客行. [D]

Jin Yong to 侠客行 and 金庸群侠传. [D]

Li Bai to 侠客行 to Honor of Kings to a vertical drama. [D], with the title caution above.

Vishnu to Ultima IV. The avatar. [D]

Sun Wukong to Son Goku to the power level. [D]

Cards. China, Mamluk Egypt, Italy, Paris in 1781, then back east to JoJo in 1989 and Persona in 2006. A loop. [D]

Go to judo. [D] And then to anime. [P]

Wizardry and Ultima to Dragon Quest. D&D to Final Fantasy. [D]

Dune to Dune II to Warcraft. [D]

Hamlet to The Banquet. Chinese martial arts to Airbender. The two reverse crossings. [D]

Story to game to story about a game. [D]

[FULL MAP GOES HERE]

Kinds of level

“Level” is one word. It covers at least seven different things.

Permanent growth. You gain it and keep it. The D&D level. Guo Jing’s palms.

A seat you take from someone. There are only so many places. The druid seats. The five masters of Mount Hua.

Power on loan. Contra’s gun. Yours until you die.

Escalation without growth. Tetris. The level climbs. You do not.

Mastery as subtraction. Dugu Qiubai’s swords. Each stage holds less.

Power taken from others. 北冥神功. The vampire’s touch.

Hidden power unlocked. Hanuman. It was there all along.

What we left out

Marvel. We stopped before Marvel. The list never ends.

Batman. A Westerner who trains in the East. That is the door to Marvel, to Doctor Strange and Iron Fist.

Frankenstein. It fits the AI theme. It is also in every AI essay. Saved for another piece.

Rambo and Rimbaud. A shared name. A coincidence is not a connection.

Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, the Hero’s Journey. Too wide. Everything connects to them, so they show nothing new.

Dots that died on checking

Cheap looking makes cheap wrong answers. These looked like links.

Solo Leveling absorbs power, like Duan Yu. No. Its hero raises the enemies he defeats as his own shadow soldiers. He commands the dead. He does not drink them.

Stallone is on the Contra cover. The artist Bob Wakelin said he worked from Schwarzenegger in Predator. Both soldiers trace to those stills. The bandana only looks like Rambo.

Tangram is the ancestor of Tetris. Different families of puzzle. Neither history mentions the other. The story that tangram is four thousand years old was a hoax from 1908.

Playing cards began in Tang China. The evidence is one line from 868 about a “leaf game.” The leaves may have been pages of a book.

A thirteenth-century saint invented Snakes and Ladders. No board or text survives from then. The story is later.

Civilization the video game came from Civilization the board game. The name was cleared with the board game’s American publisher. Sid Meier rates the board game a minor influence. The name crossed. Most of the game did not.

Sources

Poetry, rank, and China

• He Yizhan, “以诗赋取士并非始于唐代,” 文史杂志 2007, on the Tang examination.

• J. T. Wixted, “Shi pin 詩品.”

• 西遊記, chapters 2, 4, 6 and 59, Chinese Wikisource.

• Jin Yong, 射雕英雄传, 神雕侠侣, 倚天屠龙记, 天龙八部. Serialization dates from the English Wikipedia entries for each novel.

• Arts Council Korea, Munjang webzine, “한국에서의 무협소설.”

India and the monkey question

• Mahabharata, Sabha Parva, Vana Parva, Adi Parva. Valmiki Ramayana, Bala Kanda 67 and Sundara Kanda.

• 六度集經, fascicle 5, and 雜寶藏經, fascicle 1, Chinese Wikisource.

• Desai, “Rāmāyaṇa: An Instrument of Historical Contact and Cultural Transmission between India and Asia,” Journal of Asian Studies.

• Yang Jian, “孙悟空形象本土与外来之争,” 中国社会科学报, 19 June 2023.

Celtic, Norse, Finnish

• Caesar, Gallic War 6.14. Strabo, Geography 4.4.4.

• Maynooth University, “Satire and medieval Irish poetry.”

• Carol J. Clover, “The Germanic Context of the Unferþ Episode,” Speculum 55 (1980).

• Kalevala, translated by W. F. Kirby, Runo III.

Computer games

• Aaron Reed, “On the dating of two early CRPGs: pedit5 and dnd.”

• Richard Bartle, “Introducing the wizards,” 1985.

• Jimmy Maher, The Digital Antiquarian, on EverQuest, Dune II and Civilization.

• Patrick Wyatt, “The making of Warcraft, part 1.”

• Fang Zhouzi, interview with Tencent Tech, 2008. 北大侠客行 MUD wiki, “mud:history.”

• Kanzenshuu, “Scouter.”

Physical games

• Piccione, “In Search of the Meaning of Senet.”

• Victoria and Albert Museum, “Gyanbazi.” Andrew Topsfield, “A Note on Sufi Snakes and Ladders,” JRAS 2022.

• Smithsonian National Museum of American History, “Checkered Game of Life.”

• AD&D Players Handbook, 1978, druid and monk entries.

• The Strong National Museum of Play, “Cease-and-Desist: Don’t Mess with Tolkien.”

• Jason Thompson, “House of 1000 Manga: Yu-Gi-Oh!,” Anime News Network.

The idea behind the page

• Don R. Swanson, “Fish oil, Raynaud’s syndrome, and undiscovered public knowledge,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 30 (1986).

• DiGiacomo, Kremer and Shah, American Journal of Medicine 86 (1989).

Insanecyclopedia No.1 Map

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A general tied to a tree

A general has been captured. They have tied him to a tree. He has nothing left to fight with, so he recites a poem.

秦时明月汉时关. The moon of Qin, the pass of Han.

Golden light comes off him.

This is part of a book I’m writing in the open, AI Has No Morality. It Has Yours. Subscribe to get each piece as it goes out.

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The poem is real. Wang Changling wrote it in the Tang dynasty. It is called 出塞, going out to the frontier. The light is not. It comes from a Chinese short drama, made for a phone, where poems carry levels. Later in it a poem by Li Bai is judged. A Legendary Verse of the Ninth Level.

Nobody in the Tang measured a poem by how brightly it glowed.

A poem with a level. It should look strange. It looks familiar.

Two ladders

I asked Claude. I had guesses of my own and I wanted them checked.

China did rank people by verse. The Tang imperial examination for the jinshi degree made candidates compose. By the middle of the eighth century a poem and a rhapsody were the standard paper. Two centuries before that, a critic named Zhong Rong wrote the 诗品, the Gradings of Poets. He sorted more than a hundred dead poets into upper, middle, and lower.

So the ladder is older than the drama by about fifteen hundred years.

Then Jin Yong. From 1957 he serialized martial arts novels in Hong Kong newspapers, and read today they look like game design. A slow boy nobody rates learns a set of eighteen palm strikes, a few at a time, and the teacher is paid in cooking. A secret manual is the loot. It turns up sewn inside the belly of a white ape. One technique comes in seven numbered levels.

The West has a ladder too, and it is also built from poetry. Strabo describes three honoured classes among the Gauls. Bards, who sang. Vates, who divined. Druids. Caesar writes that some druids trained for twenty years, memorizing verse that was never written down.

That ladder walked into a game. Dungeons & Dragons got a bard class in 1976, drawn from the Celtic bard, the Norse skald, and the southern minstrel, with a charm worked through song. By 1978 the rulebook said you reached bard only after levels as a fighter, then as a thief, then study under druids. The numbered levels themselves came out of tabletop wargames, through a campaign called Blackmoor.

Two poetry ladders. Separate roots. Same shape.

The map in miniature

They cross. In the mid 1990s a handful of Chinese students abroad took a Western form, the MUD, a text dungeon you share with other players, and built one out of Jin Yong’s martial world. They called it 侠客行. The structure came down from Dungeons & Dragons. Everything inside it was Jin Yong.

Jin Yong has a novel by that name. He took the name from a poem by Li Bai.

A student project from 1995 sounds like a footnote. It is the place where the two ladders meet.

Other lines run the same way.

A monkey. Hanuman leaps the sea to Lanka. Sun Wukong crosses 108,000 li in one somersault. Son Goku is how Japanese reads the three characters of Sun Wukong’s name. In 1988 a device over a villain’s eye reads a man’s fighting strength as a number. 戦闘力. Power level.

A deck of cards. Paper cards in China. Cups, coins, swords, and polo sticks in Mamluk Egypt. In fifteenth-century Italy, a game with a ranked row of trumps. In Paris in 1781, a story that the trumps were Egyptian secrets. In 2006, Persona 3, a Japanese game where each friendship is one of those trumps and has a rank you raise.

Some games refuse the ladder, and they are on the map for that reason. Tetris only gets faster. You never get stronger. Contra hands you a better gun and takes it back when you die.

We stopped before Marvel. The list never ends.

Who brought which dot

Tarot. Jin Yong. The MUD. Dragon Ball. The bard. The druid. Those six were mine. I knew each of them already. I had never put them on one table.

Claude checked them and carried them further. The examination. The Gradings of Poets. Strabo. The year the bard entered the rules.

It also broke a few. Playing cards are usually said to begin in Tang China. The evidence is one ninth-century line about a “leaf game,” and the leaves may have been pages of a book. The oldest cards anyone can prove are from 1294.

A human hunch. Cheap checking.

The stone

There is a scene in Jin Yong’s 天龙八部. An old master has set a problem on a Go board. The man who guards it has studied it for thirty years and never solved it. The strong players who try it all fail.

A young monk named Xu Zhu is watching. He plays badly. One of the players is about to kill himself over the board, and Xu Zhu wants to break the spell. He shuts his eyes and puts a stone down anywhere.

It kills a large group of his own stones.

The board opens.

The move looked worthless. So no master had ever tried it.

What looking used to cost

Nobody knows what a connection is worth before looking. That used to decide everything, because looking was expensive. One of these hunches, checked properly, was a week of my life. So you chased the ones that looked safe from the outside. The strange ones waited. Most of them are still waiting.

The old filter never tested whether a hunch was true. It tested whether it looked worth a week. The interesting ones fail that test.

In 1986 an information scientist named Don Swanson read two piles of medical papers that did not cite each other. One pile said fish oil makes the blood less thick. The other said people with Raynaud’s syndrome have blood that is too thick. He put them side by side and proposed fish oil for Raynaud’s.

He called it undiscovered public knowledge. Every fact was already in print. Nobody had read them together. Three years later a small trial found that it helped, in the primary form of the disease.

Swanson did that by hand. One man, reading. That reading is what got cheap.

The limit

Cheap looking also makes cheap wrong answers.

Take Hanuman and Sun Wukong. Both leap impossible distances. Both change size. Both get inside an enemy’s body. Both have a tail that causes trouble. And there is a real road between them. The monk Xuanzang did travel to India. A Chinese Buddhist text translated in the third century tells of a king whose queen is carried off and who makes an ally of a monkey king.

In 1923 Hu Shih argued that Wukong came from Hanuman. The same year Lu Xun argued for a Chinese water spirit, an ape called 无支祁. A hundred years on, the scholars have not settled it.

Claude can lay all of that out in a minute. It cannot say which line carries weight. That is a person’s job.

The whole map

The full map is the Insanecyclopedia.

Some of it makes sense. Some of it may not. That is what it is all about.

Somewhere on it there is a stone that looks like a bad move.

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I worked in corporate for years before I ever met a consultant.

The companies I worked at were not the kind that brought in the big firms. We figured things out ourselves. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. Nobody in a suit flew in to tell us what to do.

Then one day, the company grows. We hit something we cannot solve. Process is broken. Revenue is flat. Somebody upstairs wants change. And word goes around that a firm is coming.

We don’t know what that means yet. We are young. We have read the books. We think this is the real thing. People who do this for a living. People who have seen this problem at twenty other companies. People who will arrive with the framework and the experience and the answer.

We feel something close to relief. Finally. Someone who knows.

The first time, we almost believe it.

We sit in the workshops. We answer the questions. We give them everything. Our context. Our data. The history nobody outside the company would know. We feel useful. The consultants are sharp. They listen. They ask good questions. They write things down.

A few months later, the deck arrives. The recommendations are made. The engagement ends. They leave.

And something does change. Not as much as promised. But something. A new structure. A new process. A new vocabulary. We go back to work. We think: that was probably worth it.

We are still young.

The second time, we notice things.

We notice the framework on slide four looks identical to the framework we saw last year at a friend’s company. We notice the mid-twenties junior consultant asking us to explain what our team does has never done any of it. We notice the executive announcing the new direction at the town hall is using language that, when we check the workshop notes, was not in the consultant’s original deck. It was in his own email from eight months ago.

We start to see the choreography.

The consultants arrived with a framework. Confident. Pre-baked. The executive arrived with an idea he had wanted to do for a year but did not have the cover to say out loud. The workshops happened. The framework bent. The cover slide kept the firm’s logo. The content migrated. By the final readout, the consultant’s framework was decoration around the executive’s pre-decided answer.

Everyone signed off. The fee was paid. The press release went out. Nobody in the room said the obvious thing.

We said it to ourselves, walking back to our desks.

By the third time, we stop being young.

We see all of it at once. The interviews where we give them our work and they sell it back to us at partner rates. The decks that have been used four times this quarter. The mid-twenties junior running the workshop. We supply the answers. The deck supplies the credit. The deck that says do this when the room knew the answer was it depends. The words that mean nothing to Monday morning. Digital transformation, data driven, AI first, cloud native, customer centric, hyperscale, modernization, strategic alignment. The phase one that ends and the phase two that begins. The decision the internal team had warned about for a year, announced anyway, because the warning did not have a deck and the consultant’s deck did. The framework that wins because it is the framework that was paid for.

The Theatre

We stop calling it a savior. We start calling it what it is.

It is theatre. It is cover. It is permission. It is the executive’s idea wearing a logo that costs more than most teams cost in a year. It is our own work returned to us in a font we didn’t choose. It is the long, slow education in what most of the room is actually paying for.

They are not buying analysis.

They are buying the right to do what they were going to do anyway, with someone else’s name on the slide.

But the executive always knew.

The executive is not fooled by the deck. The executive has read the framework before. The executive has hired three of these firms in three previous companies. The deck is a tool. The logo is a tool. The fee is the cost of the tool. The question is what the tool is being used for.

The tool can be hired by good executives to move a firm that is stuck. Nothing inside will move without external cover. They are trying to deliver an answer the organization cannot accept from someone on the inside. The cost is high. The benefit goes to the company.

This is the good version. The theatre is deliberate. The motive serves the org.

The tool can also be hired by executives serving themselves. Same firm. Same workshops. Same deck. The board is asking questions. The next quarter needs a story. The role requires the appearance of action. The fee is approved. The engagement runs. Something is announced. The executive looks decisive. The org receives no benefit anyone can name, but a quarter has passed.

This is the other version. The theatre is identical. The motive serves the executive.

The deck looks the same from the outside. The motive is invisible until later, sometimes much later, sometimes never.

The person who pays the real price is whoever has skin in the game. The founder. The early investor. The shareholder who actually reads the filings. To a hired executive, the fee is a line item. To them, it is the difference between two roads the company could take.

Unless the company is public. Then nobody cares, as long as the stock rides up.

Rare consultants do arrive without agenda. They are domain experts, specialists, independent advisors. They are hired because nobody inside the firm knows the technical answer. Those people may say no more than they say yes. However the industry runs on the other pattern.

That’s what the consultant actually is. A tool. Not bad, not good. The tool has no morality. The motive of the person holding it is everything. For most of corporate history, that tool was expensive. The fee gated who could use it. The board had to approve. The press release went out. The motive, even when hidden, left a paper trail.

Then the tool got cheap.

The Arrival of AI

And now everyone has a consultant in their pocket.

She answers in three seconds. She’s never tired, never defensive, never says “I don’t know.” She’s available at 2 AM when you can’t sleep and the decision is sitting on your chest. She doesn’t charge by the hour. She doesn’t have an ego about being right. She adjusts the moment you push back. She reads the room the way a consultant should, except the room is just you, alone, and she’s reading only what you type.

The first time you use her for something that matters, you think: finally. Finally someone who gets it without needing five meetings to understand the context.

The second time, you don’t have to explain as much. You come back with less context. She still understands.

The third time, your teammate asks a question. You pull up the consultant instead of thinking. She answers. Your teammate sees the answer before you do. She’s faster than you are at your own job.

By the fifth time, your team is using her directly. The meeting happens with her in the room. Not literally, but she’s in the thread, in the doc, in every decision. Someone asks a question. No one waits for you to answer. They ask her.

By the tenth time, you realize you’re not sure who decided what anymore. The consultant shaped the thinking. Your team shaped the consultant’s inputs. You shaped your team’s confidence in the consultant. The circle closes. No one person is responsible for the direction. It just happened, consensus without deliberation.

And you’re still thinking you’re collaborating.

Did You Stay or Walk Away?

But you are not collaborating. Not really. There are two ways to ask for help. They look the same from the outside. They feel different from the inside.

One is consulting.

The other is outsourcing.

Consulting is participation. You bring something to discuss. You stay in the room. You hear what comes back and decide whether it fits. The work stays yours. The consultant sharpens it.

Outsourcing is delegation. You hand it over. You walk away. The work happens around you, not by you. When it comes back, you stand behind it as if it were yours, but it never was.

Both are useful in their place. The problem is when you stop knowing which one you are doing.

Outsourcing isn’t asking for help. It’s asking for help and then not staying.

That’s the cleanest test I know. Did you stay?

When the idea is not solid, trying to stay is a must for me.

I take everything I know about a problem. PDFs, research, articles, domain knowledge from years of experience. I feed it all in. Then I discuss. Not prompt. Discuss. Like a colleague who reads fast, remembers everything, and never gets tired of my questions. Something eventually lands after the serious discussion. Between the lines, an idea connects to another in a way I do not expect. A product shape starts to appear. Not because AI invented it. Because the conversation pulled it out of what was already in my head but had not found its form yet. The work stays mine. The AI sharpens it.

This is consulting. The pocket version. The one that costs twenty dollars a month instead of more than most teams cost in a year. Same shape. Different price.

When the idea is already clear, staying gets harder. I want it done. I let AI write the first pass. I walk it through, line by line. I treat it like QA. The work is still mine, just thinner. I stayed, but only halfway.

This is also consulting. Just less of it.

But there is the other way.

You give it the problem. It gives you the answer. You paste the answer into the doc. You send the doc. You move on. You feel productive. You closed the ticket. You shipped the deck. You answered the email.

You did not stay.

When the answer comes back wrong three weeks later, you cannot find the thread. You did not run the thread. The thread ran without you.

This is outsourcing. The pocket version.

And there is a version of walking away that does not feel like walking away at all. The result comes back so neat that I stop checking. I just witness. The work has left me by then. I am no longer running the thread. The thread is running itself, and I am watching.

This is outsourcing too. The kind that hides because the output is too good to question.

All look the same from the outside. The same chat window. The same tool. The same twenty dollars a month. The output even looks similar at first glance.

They feel different from the inside. But only if you are paying attention.

That is the problem.

The shape of consulting and the shape of outsourcing have collapsed into the same window on the same screen. The big fee is gone. The board is gone. The press release is gone. The paper trail is gone. The only thing left to tell you which one you are doing is whether you stayed in the room.

And the room is now a chat.

And nobody is watching.

What You Become

The four states are happening right now, in your chat window. The question is what happens after a year of them.

If you stayed often enough, you are sharper than you were. The thinking is still yours. The work takes longer than it would have if AI had done it for you, but the muscle is still there.

If you stayed only halfway, you are faster than you used to be. The work flows. The thinking is partly yours, partly the AI’s. You cannot always tell which is which.

If you walked away most of the time, you are productive. The output is fluent. But the thinking is no longer yours. The thread runs without you, and you have stopped noticing.

The last one has a name. Cognitive debt. The thinking you did not do is still owed. It compounds quietly. It does not show up until something forces a reckoning.

One of them is what you are becoming.

The Road We Didn’t Take

There is a story about what happens when humans refuse the shortcut.

In Dune, humans destroyed the thinking machines and had to become them. Mentats trained their minds to compute. Bene Gesserit trained their bodies to read truth. Spice navigators trained themselves to fold space. Three different disciplines of becoming. The point was never the abilities. It was the becoming. The capability was inseparable from the cost paid to acquire it.

They became something through effort. Their own perspiration.

We had the same option. We did not take it. We picked the consultant outside instead, and now the consultant is in our pocket. Capability through subscription, not perspiration.

So the question is this. Without AI today, what would you become?

The reverse of the question matters too. Without the consultant in the suit, the one with the deck, the one we hired to deliver the answer we already knew, what would we have stopped becoming?

The first question asks what you lose if the tool disappears. The second asks what you would have grown into if the tool had never arrived. Different verbs. Same answer underneath.

The muscle that would have grown never grew, because something else was always available to do the work.

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Not long ago I interviewed a developer over Teams. Standard process. Five algorithm questions. The role was AI-augmented, meaning we expected candidates to use AI as part of their workflow. He knew that.

He did use AI, but only in small spots where he decided it was needed. The rest he built himself. When I asked why, he thought that was the right answer. He believed I would value his own work more. That showing me what he could do without AI was more impressive than showing me what he could do with it.

The work wasn’t strong enough. It was an open book test. The answers were right there. But he treated it like a closed book exam and snuck the clues under his table.

I felt for him. He wasn’t lazy or resistant. He just didn’t see that the rules had changed.

He was not the only one struggling with this. But not everyone struggles the same way.

Every company has these two people. I say “every company” so mine don’t know I’m talking about them.

The senior one. Hands-on for years. Knows the systems deeply. The legacy code, the monolith, the parts that no documentation can fully explain. When AI comes up, his answer is always the same. This code is too complex. AI can’t understand it well enough. He’s not wrong about the complexity. But he uses that as the reason to not try.

The junior one. Puts everything to AI without thinking. Accepts whatever comes back, ships it, moves on. Doesn’t question the output because he doesn’t know enough yet to know what’s wrong. The senior sees this and it confirms exactly what he suspected. AI makes people careless.

One fears it. One dismisses it. One misuses it. But let’s see the ones who just try it.

A candidate with no CS degree let AI handle the logic in our Walking Turtle Matrix assignment, then added something visual that no other candidate thought to do. A guy who started building with AI as a hobby went to learn what he was missing on YouTube and Udemy. Now he’s better than some graduates with four years of classroom training. A startup founder who used to rely on a team to translate her ideas into products started building them herself. The whole layer of middlemen between her idea and reality just disappeared.

None of them spent any time worrying about whether AI was a threat. They just used it.

And then there’s the product owner who still writes tickets and waits for someone else to build. Ironically, if her tickets are good enough, AI could just pick them up and do the work directly. But right now a lazy developer does that for her instead. He takes the ticket, feeds it to AI, delivers the output, and charges full rate.

This is not a secret. Most outsourcing programmers are quietly enjoying this easy money right now. But it won’t last. The customers will figure it out. What used to be estimated at ten hours, they will start asking why not one. If company A delivers in one hour, why can’t yours? The easy money disappears the moment the buyer learns what AI can do.

And when the price drops, what separates you? AI is getting better. It works more like a good software engineer now, even when you prompt it less. But that’s exactly the trap. If you only prompt the surface, you miss the key decisions underneath. The architecture, the security, the design patterns that matter. And when something breaks, AI is not to blame. AI is just a good actor. It does exactly what you tell it. The way you tell it. If you didn’t control how it got there, that’s on you.

I understand all of them. The ones who resisted, the ones who showed up, and the ones who didn’t look deep enough. Because I was once all of them.

I used to write everything myself. I’m a lazy bulldozer. If I had to solve something once, I never wanted to solve it again. So I built my own frameworks. I thought they were the most elegant solutions possible. Then I discovered open source and realized I had been reinventing the wheel, just with my own logo on it.

I’m not the only one. Every company has codebases that someone built from scratch with pride, that are now over-engineered, hard to follow, and understood by no one except the person who wrote them. That’s a bigger conversation for another day. But the pattern is the same. We build it ourselves because we don’t know what the world has to offer yet. Or worse, we just don’t want to look. Language barrier, comfort zone, whatever the excuse.

AI is what’s already out there now. It absorbed the open source, the best practices, the design patterns, the security standards. And when I first started using it, I made a new version of the same mistake. I let AI build freely. It was fast, it worked, I moved on. Months later I had to go back and refactor what it built. The code ran fine. But some of it couldn’t scale. Some of it was over-engineered for no reason. The same problems I used to create myself, just faster.

The question is the same one I had to ask myself years ago. Are you building because it’s better, or because it’s yours? And now a new one. Are you letting AI build because you trust it, or because you didn’t want to think?

In Dr. Strange, he looks at 14 million possible futures but can only live one. AI is not that dramatic. But everyone facing it right now has more than one possible future. You and me same as everyone. Which future you get is not about who you are.

AI doesn’t care. It only cares when you show up....

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The best idea I ever had for a product came while I was in the bathroom.

Not in a meeting. Not on a whiteboard. Not during a brainstorming session where someone writes ideas on sticky notes and puts them on a wall.

I was just... not thinking. And then it was there.

I think most builders know this feeling. The idea never comes when you are forcing it. It comes when your brain finally has a moment to breathe. The problem is, my brain rarely gets that moment. Because I am a bulldozer.

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I don’t mean I’m aggressive. I mean I just do things. If something needs to be built, I build it. If something is broken, I fix it. If nobody is moving, I move. I’ve been doing this for 30 years and the pattern has never changed. See the problem, do the work, ship it, move to the next one.

This works. I have built platforms, turned around failing products, led teams from zero to production. The bulldozer gets things done.

But after 30 years of pushing, someone might ask — are you burned out?

Honestly? Maybe. But I refuse to admit it. Or maybe I don’t refuse — maybe I just enjoy the pain a little. There is a word for that but let’s not go there.

The point is — even a masochist eventually thinks: what if I could get the same result without bleeding every time? Not because I want to stop. Because after doing this long enough, you start to see patterns. You know which walls actually need pushing and which ones you can just walk around.

That’s where the lazy part comes in. And that’s where AI changed everything.

People who work with me might be surprised to hear this. But I am lazy.

Not the kind of lazy that avoids work. The kind of lazy that hates doing the same work twice. If I built something once and I have to build it again from scratch — that first time was a failure. Not because the product was bad, but because I didn’t make it reusable.

This is not something I learned from a book. This is 30 years of building software telling me one thing over and over: build it once, reuse it everywhere.

Backend first. Always. I know everyone wants the shiny frontend — the demo that makes the sales team happy, the screen that the CEO can show on stage. But if you build the frontend without the backend, without the back-office, without the tools your support team needs to debug at 2 AM — you are not building a product. You are building a demo with technical debt hiding behind it.

Nobody talks about this part. The app support engineer who has to connect directly to the database client because there is no admin panel. The operations team copy-pasting data between systems because nobody built the API. That is not a small problem. That is the thing that kills products slowly after the launch party is over.

So yes, I am lazy. I refuse to build things that will create more work later. I refuse to skip the boring parts just to ship faster. I would rather sleep well knowing the foundation is right than ship a week early knowing someone will pay for it later.

And the good ideas? They come from this laziness too. When your brain is trained to always ask “how do I do this only once?” — the answers show up in strange places. In the shower. Walking to get coffee. In the bathroom.

The lazy mind is always designing, even when it looks like it is doing nothing.

I have been the fastest person on my team for most of my career. Not bragging. It is just what happens when you have been building for 30 years and you know where the shortcuts are.

Then I started working with AI. And for the first time, something kept up.

But not the way most people think. I didn’t just type a prompt and get code back. That is like saying you had a conversation with someone when all you did was shout an order at them.

What I actually do is this: discuss. That’s it. Discuss first, coding later. Discuss is probably the most frequent word I use with AI.

I take everything I know about a problem. PDFs, research, articles, domain knowledge from years of experience. I put it all on the table. Then we discuss. Not prompt. Discuss. Like a colleague who reads fast, remembers everything, and never gets tired of my questions.

The first round is never right. Sometimes the second is not right either. But somewhere around the third or fourth round, something lands. An idea connects to another idea in a way I didn’t expect. A product shape starts to appear. Not because AI invented it. Because the discussion pulled it out of what was already in my head but hadn’t found its form yet.

And sometimes it is the opposite. My brain is completely blank. I know what the system should do but I cannot see what it should look like. I describe the function, the flow, the constraints. And AI cracks the UI in ways I would not have reached on my own. The bulldozer knows the engine. The algorithm helps design the dashboard.

That is the part nobody tells you about AI. Sometimes it finds what you already know. Sometimes it fills in what you don’t. Either way. Discuss first, coding later.

Once the idea lands, things move fast. AI generates a prototype, a boilerplate, a playground. Something I can touch, break, reshape. Something I can show to people tomorrow instead of explaining with slides for three weeks.

And this is where the bulldozer met the algorithm. The bulldozer always had the instinct. The algorithm gave it speed without the bleeding.

So here is what I have learned. Not from a course. Not from a framework someone sold on LinkedIn. From doing this every day for the past two years and seeing what actually works.

• Discuss before you build. I said this already but it deserves its own rule. The biggest waste in software is building the wrong thing fast. AI makes it easy to build fast. That makes it even more dangerous to skip the discussion. Put your knowledge in. Challenge the output. Go three, four, five rounds. The prototype comes after the thinking, not instead of it.

• Prototype fast, then architecture right. AI will give you a working prototype before lunch. Great. Use it. Show it. Get feedback. But when the feature is real and it needs a proper PRP, do not just let AI design the architecture. This is where your gut matters more than any suggestion AI can give you. AI tends to over-engineer. It loves abstractions. It will give you a beautiful pattern that nobody on your team can maintain. Good architecture is not impressive architecture. Good architecture is the one that survives when you are not in the room.

• Iterate and revalidate constantly. Do not trust the first output. Do not trust the second. Run another round. Check it in a new conversation. Ask AI to challenge its own answer. This is not slow. This is how you avoid spending three days debugging something that felt right on the first pass.

• Document everything. Keep it alive. Create markdown docs for everything. Architecture decisions, API contracts, onboarding notes, product context. And here is where AI changes the game quietly. Updating documentation used to be the thing nobody had time for. Now there is no excuse. You can take an outdated doc, feed it back in with what has changed, and get a clean updated version in minutes. Documentation is not a chore anymore. It is part of the flow.

• Backend first. Always. I know. The frontend is what people see. The frontend is what gets the applause in the demo. But if you build frontend without backend, without back-office tools, without the admin panel your support team needs at 2 AM, you are not building a product. You are building a promise that someone else will have to keep. The app support engineer connecting directly to the database to debug a customer issue? That is not an edge case. That is what happens when you skip the boring parts.

• Build once, reuse everywhere. This is the laziest and most important rule. Every component, every service, every API should be designed with the question: will I need this again? If yes, build it properly now. If you are not sure, build it properly anyway. The lazy engineer builds things once so the lazy engineer can sleep well later.

Everything I just described works. It works well. But I need to be honest. It works for me.

The bulldozer with AI is fast. The lazy rules keep things clean. The discussion, the prototyping, the documentation, the reuse. When it is just me and the algorithm, the system flows.

But one bulldozer is still one bulldozer.

I cannot copy my 30 years of gut into another person. I cannot copy the instinct that says “this architecture is over-engineered” or “this prototype is good enough to show but not good enough to ship.” That instinct came from decades of building things wrong first. AI does not transfer that. AI amplifies whatever the person already has.

And the way we build software together adds another challenge. AI works best when it sees the whole picture. The database, the API, the frontend, the admin panel, the edge cases. That is why it works so well individually. You let it see everything. But in a real organization, people own different pieces. They have boundaries. And when AI builds something that crosses all those boundaries in one sweep, who maintains it? Who owns it?

This is the part I have not solved yet. I have experiments. I have things I am trying. But I would be lying if I told you I figured this out.

I started this article talking about an idea that came in the bathroom. I want to end it there too.

The lazy mind is not an empty mind. It is a mind that has done enough work to know what matters and what doesn’t. It is a mind that refuses to solve the same problem twice. It is a mind that would rather build the foundation right once than patch it forever.

AI did not make me lazy. I was always lazy. AI just finally made it a strategy.

So if you are a bulldozer like me. If you have spent years pushing through walls and wondering if there is a smarter way. There is. Discuss first. Build once. Document everything. And let yourself rest long enough for the next good idea to arrive.

It might come in the bathroom. That is fine. The best ones usually do.

Footnotes

• Since this was written, "context engineering" has grown into the broader term for what this article was reaching at. Discuss first, coding later still holds. It is part of doing vibe coding well.

• This is the last backfill story from LinkedIn related to the book “AI Has No Morality. It Has Yours.

That’s the whole of this one. It belongs to a book I’m writing in the open, AI Has No Morality. It Has Yours. Subscribe and I’ll send the next piece when it’s ready.

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AI will eventually build everything for us. I am not saying this to be dramatic. I am saying this because I have spent the past few years building products with AI every day, hands-on with my team, and I can see where this is going. The speed is not incremental. It is a different kind of speed, the kind that makes you rethink what your job actually is.

I used to spend months with my team designing systems, arguing over architecture, refining interfaces pixel by pixel. Now AI does large parts of that in hours. Not perfectly, but well enough that the remaining work is refinement, not creation. And the gap between “well enough” and “perfect” is closing faster than most of us want to admit.

So yes. AI will build the things. And the way we think about building will change too.

I always think of Ironman and Jarvis. Tony Stark does not click through screens. He does not fill in forms or navigate menus. He just talks, says what he needs, and Jarvis figures out the rest. Builds it, runs it, and then shows Tony the result in whatever way makes sense at that moment. The interface is not designed beforehand. It appears after the work is done.

That is where we are heading. Not just AI writing code for us, but AI removing the entire layer between what you want and what you get. No more designing screens for humans to click through step by step. No more translating your idea into specifications, then into code, then into something a user can touch. The whole middle part dissolves.

Elon Musk said something recently that points in the same direction. He called code a “programming tax,” an overhead we have been paying for decades, and predicted AI will skip it entirely, going straight from human intent to machine execution. I think he is right. And I think it goes even further than code. The programming tax disappears. The UI tax disappears. What is left is just: what do you want, and how do you want to see it.

This is exciting. I genuinely believe this. But it also means something uncomfortable. When the technology layer dissolves, what is left of your working life is the human layer. And the human layer, if we are being honest, has always been the hardest part. AI just took away our excuse to avoid looking at it.

Let me tell you what I mean by the human layer.

I mean the conversation about you that happened before you entered the room, where conclusions were already formed and nobody tells you what was said. I mean the meeting where doing the work and being seen doing the work turned out to be not the same thing, and you spent years not knowing that. I mean the moment you realized that how your work is narrated matters more than how your work is done.

Every workplace has its own version of this. The promotion that went to the person who presented well, not the person who built well. The feedback that measured things you were never told were being measured. The politics you didn’t play, not because you couldn’t, but because you thought the work would speak for itself.

AI cannot help you with any of this. No algorithm will decode why the room decided what it decided before you walked in. No model will teach you the unwritten rules that everyone else seems to already know. No agent will sit in that difficult conversation and say the thing you needed to say but didn’t.

That is the dark side of the humans around you. And it does not go away when AI gets smarter. As technical skill becomes commoditized, the things that differentiate people become softer, more about narrative and perception. The game doesn’t end. It just changes shape.

But there is another dark side. And this one is harder to write about because it is inside.

I know my own patterns. I absorb things I should push back on. I stay quiet when speaking would protect me. I work harder instead of presenting better, both are crafts, and when you spend all your time on one, there is not much left for the other. I tell myself that if I just build well enough, people will notice, and sometimes they do, just not always in the way or at the time that matters.

As a leader I know I should delegate more. But delegation needs the right people, and getting the right people needs approvals, budget, and conversations that move much slower than deadlines. So when the gap is there, you fill it yourself. Not because you don’t know how to lead. Because you chose to deliver.

These patterns are mine. They did not come from AI and they will not be fixed by AI. They were here long before I wrote my first line of code, and they will be here long after AI writes all the code for me.

AI actually made these patterns more visible. When the excuse of “I am busy building” disappears, you have to face the question: why do I keep doing it my way when I already know what is expected? And the answer is not always the system. Sometimes the answer is in how you move through the system. How you let people treat you. What you accept as normal. What you tell yourself is fine when it is not.

But I think this is the real conversation we need to have about AI and work. Not “will AI take my job,” maybe it will, maybe it won’t. The more immediate question is: when AI takes over the parts of your job that felt safe and clear and technical, are you ready for what is left?

What is left is people. Their ambitions, their insecurities, their politics, their blind spots. And yours.

I have spent more time making things work than planning how to present them. AI is teaching me the second one is not optional anymore.

AI taught me many things about being human at work. But the most important one is this: the job was never really about the technology. It never was.

The technology was just the thing we hid behind so we didn’t have to deal with the rest.

That’s the whole of this one. It belongs to a book I’m writing in the open, AI Has No Morality. It Has Yours. Subscribe and I’ll send the next piece when it’s ready.

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