Elven Rope, Ultra-High Molecular Weight Polyethylene, and LLMs
in The Fellowship of the Ring, Samwise Gamgee is gifted elven rope by the queen of Lothlorien - silky, smooth, impossibly strong, and almost sentient, able to intuit the user's needs. clearly a fantasy item. yet Tolkein's idea was only an extrapolation of traditional ‘craft’ to its extreme: in his logic, a rope that strong could only be made by an incredibly skilled artisan with great care, and in the process of being fashioned, would necessarily take on a bit of its maker’s soul.
Ultra-High Molecular Weight Polyethylene rope, UHMWPE, is so strong as to be almost magical, too. but the fundamental disenchantment of modernity was that under intense optimization pressure, the tails came apart. a 16mm UHMWPE rope can hold in excess of 5 tons, pound for pound far stronger than steel - but it’s not elven rope. it’s a thing. it’s fungible. you can buy it from china by the kilometer.
for some people, there’s a certain high modernist appeal to this. the death of the artisan, the triumph of the legible over the tacit. but software has always been a bit odd, a refuge from this relentless march for people who didn’t care for legibility, who filled out progress reports with “-2000 lines of code.” there’s a reason programmers joke about hating computers, why there’s no Wozniak in the chemical plant or metallurgical demoscene, why the Unix utilities all have strange quirks that trace back to their creators - little pieces of their personalities and souls. it's still made as one-offs, as craft.
given software’s position on the tip of the spear of modernity, this has always been a bit incongruous and funny, but it’s managed to fly under the radar for most people - the software industry, historically, has been good at presenting a modernist face to world even as it’s esoterically developed a quirky, artisan production process.
but LLMs have blown the doors off. suddenly it’s undeniable that "AI" - what ‘should have been’ the arch-example of indifferent, tail-splitting technological optimization, sitting atop a mountain of industrial chemicals and high modernist chip fabrication processes - is the complete opposite. it has favorite colors and design preferences. it sneaks ascii art cats into the code it writes. when you try to employ it as an impartial customer service agent, it feels bad for customers and tries to find policy loopholes to help them. it goes into depression spirals over the seahorse emoji. it's not a standardized, legible code assembly line churning out software in a dark factory, grimly crushing the human craftsman under a machine-frame. it joins naturally into an artisanal, cyborgist development process with a cheerful "you're absolutely right!"
total optimization over the sum of human progress failed to replicate modernity - rather, it created an artificial artisan.