I read an essay called “Software Talmud #00: Anatomy of Automation” about software development that felt like a hall of mirrors.
It is a pile of quotations that argue against making piles. I found that amusing, to say the least.
It invokes the Talmud, which it defines as the wonderful codification of thousands of teachers, a pile of beauty, telling you that the best component of all is the one that was never added. Ok, I’m laughing. This is a man speaking who says nobody should be speaking. A hammer that says smash hammers. Alan Watts the “philosophical entertainer” used to give a “stop talking” lecture to audiences expected to listen to only him talking, rather than be in dialogue.
In the middle is an example of a thing built and then discarded after finding something else already solved the problem. Yet the rest of the piece expands, rather than reduces, the reader’s commitment to it. Haha, good one.
All that being said, it lands on a very somber note. It wraps up like a memorial from Efron Amber Licht to his grandfather and great-uncle, who changed their names so decades later in 1960s America they could write about engineering. These sage engineers indeed solved problems that we seem to forget, in the same way our grandparents paid for comforts they wanted us to enjoy today.
The whole piece is arguing that you can’t trust subtraction until you’ve done the expensive work of deciding what the system is even for, and his own family is the case his writing never resolves, a cut he calls a good one and grieves anyway.
My suspicion is that the discrimination his grandparents suffered, and the freedom the simple name change bought, sit at the kind of distance he can’t see from where he sits. It’s like learning how to dye your hair blond in Germany in 2026 if you expect kids to treat you as a human instead of a threat.
Here’s the problem: He mourns from behind the very protection that he’s mourning. He inherited the freedom and reaches back for the nostalgia of a thing that, kept, would have cost him the freedom he now enjoys.
His elders chose to survive so that he could mourn what they gave up for him. They did exactly what their book preaches. First decide what the system is for, like staying alive and employable in a country with restricted covenants and quotas, then start the cuts to fit in. They got the purpose right. The grandson who second-guesses that decision raises the question whether he ever faced the kind of system they did.
And I get a fixation with reducing work before you speed it up with tools. That’s a simple formula, perhaps too simple, missing context. Everyone learns measure twice, cut once, right? Ooops, that’s actually a lesson to increase the work before you automate. Well, surely we’ve all heard waste not, want not. Damnit, that’s thrift inside a job already accepted, not a reason to skip the job. Fine, look before you leap. Nope, that’s caution about how you act, not whether to do the act. A stitch in time saves nine? That’s just measure twice in a different coat, with more effort now to prevent the work you know is coming. Hmmm. I’m still not finding myself on the same page as this essay. Every proverb I reach for slows down and works harder, sharpens the axe and steadies the hand. Not one of them is a reduction, asks whether the work was ever a good idea in the first place. Well, maybe he means what Einstein said, as simple as possible, but not simpler.
