Make something for someone

I recently listened to the album Music for Existing by producer Martyn. I wasn’t really familiar with him, and in fact it got algorithmically recommended by me because the album features Duval Timothy, whose album Meeting with a Judas Tree I adore.

The track Musa at Erbil, which features the voice and words of Musa Okwonga features a beautiful reflection on modern life, which really resonated with me as a software professional, although I realize that that last part probably wasn’t his intention. It is worth quoting here in full, but please also listen to the track and possibly buy it:

This blew me away.

Without beating around the bush, we’re trying to automate ourselves out a job. I do this, and for a large part this has led me to be very productive. I have built systems I could not have built because I used coding assistance, and have learned things I would not have otherwise learned. This to say that this is not something I shy away from.

But at the same time I am afraid of losing the fun part. This is the part which makes the creation of software feel like creation. This is when you make something by hand, together with another human being. You brainstorm about what you want to achieve, share your goals and your dreams, loudly ask daring questions about which machinery is missing, and dream about building this together. And then, you tap a bunch of keys which makes symbols appear on a screen in a little box and you then run some commands and then suddenly the thing you made is alive. You have made something! For a while last year, I worked by myself on a bunch of open source projects, but it just wasn’t fun at all. It wasn’t intellectually stimulating in the same way as writing code together is. This is the dreaming part, it’s making things together, being part of a well-oiled machine together, fixing the machine together when it’s broken, saying sorry when you break it, be a little bit mad at your partner for breaking it but also help them fix it.

The biggest risk in giving away your agency to a machine is not downskilling, making yourself vulnerable to bugs, it’s about losing touch with others, and unlearning what it means to make something together, or even despising working together with others. The worst thing we can become is a bunch of people sitting alone and just efficiently but soulleslly contributing code to some god-forsaken pile nobody cares about. To quote the text above: “what are we doing?” We know that good things happen when people actually care about what they make, we just need to be brave enough to accept the consequences of working with humans.