Labour day was around the corner and I had been contemplating a small vacation. I talked it over with a friend and we shopped for touring packages. The decision to settle on the Maasai Mara was one of want. I had been interested in watching the lion up-close hunting, this apparently is not that common to witness from what a tour guide said. I took lots of pictures; of giraffes, gazelles, warthogs and I got to see a cheetah going to shade with a fat belly from a kill. You know, the wild. But there were moments of utter boredom that I had to fill up.
I was reading Notes from the Underground by Dostoevsky to pass the time. I did not get to finish it but I got a hold of the first few pages before I forgot and lost it. Why? Apparently seeing a leopard is extremely hard and most do not tick it off their list before they finish their tours so it was a treat. I never even got to photograph that shy animal. The book was all but forgotten on the front seat pocket. (It's actually my friend Kimaru's copy I lost. He does great blogs: medium.com/@thekokotatales)
Off the back of my head it goes like: "I'm a spiteful man... a horrible man..." It goes on and on about how the narrator despises life and also makes other people's existence a living hell, for reasons I never got far enough to understand. It was a breath of fresh air, being so different. Of what it was trying to convey I cannot tell but I have my own interpretation that I have sat with for a while.
Now, you have to understand I come from Kenya; a country riddled with very corrupt leaders where each day is a chance to pass more tax laws and loot said taxes. Every system in the chain takes a cut, even traffic offences can be turned a blind eye to as long as you are willing to line the traffic man's pockets. I had not realised I landed on a great mystery that vacation weekend, about the nature of our current cannibalistic and capitalist machinery and my role in it.
There is this ever present dread of the culture shift in tech. Particularly around AI. Traditional software development was a thing that a lot of people I know, grew up with and looking up to took pride in. I remember starting to learn the Go Programming Language and there was this particular talk delivered by Sameer Ajmani about a feature called contexts. I remember he was wearing a blue t-shirt and he used really toy examples for his ideas at first but the talk started to get complex. So I would revisit it in later months, years even, and things really started to click in a good nerdy way. This is a feature he had authored as a helper library for his use cases and it later matured enough to be part of the Go language standard library. There was an art to it. Every line of code had been handcrafted word by word, like this blog post :) And there was a lot of care in why he was doing this, clearly the talk was a love letter to it if you have not caught up.
Also not to say that traditional software engineering was all sunny and rainbows. It was hard work and a lot of elbow grease to first understand documentation and translate what you've gathered into a coherent program. Half the job was mostly reading other people's code and retrofitting or copying it, but we had to understand what we were copying. The saying goes you are the average of the people you spend time with. There was an experience there that I'm trying to capture with words and can't quite get it so I'll leave it at that.
Why do I tell this story? I think there's a march most software engineers are doing towards the existential use of AI. I don't mean the use of AI is bad or good, it depends on how it's getting used, and depending on who you ask this is also up for debate. This year I have been spending most of my working hours just prompting AI models, the only thing I might be doing would be steering it in the right direction of my prompt; build my code, submit my code and call it a day. And also, pay for my AI usage subscription.
I personally speak from my point of view and I think we might have seen the golden age of software engineering that birthed Linus Torvalds, Rob Pike and that bloke who created Blender. These days there's a coldness to the work we are doing since there's productivity goals to tick off and it's a given that you have to "just use AI". It's not a future technology, it's here and we're its users. Intelligence at scale. Also coupled by the fact that we are now creating ways of automating tasks that were previously roles for entry level candidates. The efficiency is definitely there but it does leave a bad after taste in my mouth. Yet, I will still do this job until I'm brave enough to find something else to do with my life. Perhaps we all understand Notes from the Underground more than we care to admit, there's a numbness to where we feel we are heading and all are silent. Waiting for someone to stop the train to alight with them.
Sorry, for the readers who came in expecting my experiences about wildlife and the sort. I also like the analogy of the state of my dissolution marrying into the Maasai Mara but my writing, at the time of writing, is not good enough yet to weave the parallels yet. I just knew I had to talk about the Maasai Mara and then strike a tangent into something I really wanted to talk about.
I'll at the very least I treated you to some pictures of the Mara!