The New York Times published a long piece by Clive Thompson on how AI is transforming programming. It’s like hearing someone drag their nails on a philosophy chalkboard in an attempt to erase centuries of human progress.

Developers at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and startups describe a world where they barely need to write code anymore. They prompt a servile machine. They review from a distance, as if pleased as punch to be sipping on the veranda as all the work is done by others. They describe what they want in English and turn their cotton-pickin’ agents loose because of a newfangled device that automates “quality” tests for them. One developer reports being 10x to 100x more productive than if they did the work themselves. Another calls it liberation. That’s the language of Civil War, for those who study how Caty Green’s invention of an automation machine to end slavery (cotton ‘ngin) was stolen from her and inverted into the expansion and preservation of slavery instead. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The article frames it all through a history of “layers of abstraction” in modern programming alone. Assembly gave way to Python, Python is giving way to English. Each layer makes the previous skill set less necessary while making output more abundant. Thompson treats this as history of programming languages, with no connection to the human condition in technology domains.

The problem with developers leaning so heavily on AI companies today is so much bigger and more dangerous than what the NYT reports.

Abstraction Is Civilization

Abstraction isn’t a feature of software engineering. It’s the operating logic of every major technological transition. Who makes fire anymore instead of pushing a button? Who carries water in a bucket instead of turning a tap? The mechanism disappears into the interface. The knowledge doesn’t vanish — it gets embedded in infrastructure and then forgotten by its users. That’s not a side effect. That’s the definition of progress.

What Thompson documents without quite naming is the moment when the act of instructing machines itself becomes the thing being abstracted away. Each layer makes the previous layer’s expertise less economically necessary. And each layer moves users further from the substrate — the actual material they’re working with.

This has a name, and a book, and the book is one nobody in Silicon Valley seems to be reading but should immediately.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert Pirsig’s 1974 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is an attack on the split between what he calls romantic and classical understanding. The romantic rides the motorcycle and enjoys the wind. The classicist understands the engine and can fix it. Pirsig’s argument isn’t that one is better. It’s that Quality requires both, and a civilization that treats them as separate categories is already in trouble.

The romantic who can’t maintain the machine becomes dependent on systems he can’t evaluate. The classicist who can’t see the whole loses the capacity to ask whether the machine should exist.

What Thompson’s article documents, without the Pirsig lens, is the entire software industry migrating from classical to romantic understanding of its own product. The developers he interviews are thrilled to stop maintaining the engine. One tech executive, Anil Dash, provides the framing the piece hangs on: in coding, AI takes away the drudgery and leaves the soulful parts to you.

Pirsig would recognize this immediately as the exact attitude he spent 400 pages diagnosing as the root of the problem.

The motorcycle maintenance parallel is almost literal. Pirsig’s narrator watches his friends refuse to learn how their BMW works, then get stranded and resentful when it breaks. The vibe coders in Thompson’s piece are writing software they can’t read, shipping code they can’t debug, and calling it liberation. Pirsig’s friends called their ignorance freedom from technology too.

And Pirsig’s answer that care, attentiveness, and direct engagement with the material is the quality actually maps cleanly onto the question of what happens when nobody in the production chain can tell you whether the output is good.

The Drudgery Is the Curriculum

The piece profiles junior developers who have never worked without AI and frames them as the fortunate generation. Pirsig would frame them as people who learned to drive without ever opening the hood. Some will be fine drivers. None will become mechanics. And you won’t know which ones could have, because the pathway that would have revealed it no longer exists.

You need mechanics and drivers. Some people can be both. You don’t have to understand a spark plug to drive, but someone does. The path to becoming a mechanic is through the drudgery — you learn what a function does by writing one badly, debugging it, rewriting it. The “soulful part” Dash celebrates — taste, judgment, knowing whether the output is good — is developed through the very labor being automated away.

You don’t have to understand a spark plug to drive. But someone does. And the person who becomes that someone does it by working with spark plugs, not by describing spark plugs to an oracle.

The German education system has an answer to this. The Ausbildung system treats craft mastery as a legitimate intellectual achievement, not a consolation prize for people who didn’t make it to university. A Meister has a protected title, a defined body of knowledge, and social standing that reflects actual competence. The system assumes society needs people who understand the substrate, and builds institutions to produce them.

The Anglo-American model does the opposite. It treats abstraction as the only direction of advancement. The person who understands the engine is supposed to aspire to stop touching it. Management is the reward for competence. The whole incentive structure says: get away from the material as fast as you can.

Which is exactly the value system driving this moment. The developers in Thompson’s article aren’t just adopting a tool. They’re enacting a cultural assumption that proximity to the machine is low-status work. Prompting is management. Coding is labor. The celebration isn’t really about productivity. It’s about class migration.

The Oldest Abstraction Layer

The pattern goes much deeper than software. The Church as an abstraction layer is a systemic abuse platform. It sat between people and knowledge the same way the API sits between the developer and the code. You don’t read scripture yourself, you receive interpretation. You don’t investigate nature, you accept doctrine. The interface was the institution, and the institution’s power depended on nobody going around it to touch the substrate directly.

Descartes’ move was radical precisely because he said: I can reason from the ground up, without the interface. Cogito ergo sum is a mechanic’s statement. I’m going to open the hood myself. And it nearly got him killed! He watched what the Church did to Galileo for “Dialogues on the Two World Systems” and delayed publishing for years.

Galileo’s book was banned, and he was sentenced to a light regimen of penance and imprisonment at the discretion of church inquisitors. After one day in prison, his punishment was commuted to “villa arrest” for the rest of his life. He died in 1642. More than 300 years would pass before the church admitted Galileo was right and cleared his name of heresy [after 13 years of internal debate, in 1992].

Speaking of being killed for being intelligent, the women whom the Church targeted and burned as “witches” were, in large part, people with empirical substrate knowledge like herbalism, midwifery, and local ecology. They understood how things actually worked at the material level, which was perceived by the Church as a threat to their domination over obedient, unthinking adherents. The “witches” were in fact simply the mechanics of their day, who understood how things actually worked and why. The most intelligent women were eliminated not because their knowledge was wrong but because they were unmediated. They didn’t route through the hierarchical authorized abstraction layer of a few men who demanded total control. The threat was never any actual “magic” or “evil”. The threat only was an ability to think, to reason, and therefore freedom and independence from unthinking Church adherents.

One example is these women had brooms to sweep and clean with, and they had cats to keep vermin away. The Church ran disinformation attacks on brooms and cats, using it to burn women to death because of their ability to maintain healthy living. Killing so many women and their cats directly led to the great plague deaths, given an explosion of filthy flea-infested rats.

The ability for thought was the drudgery the Church tried to prevent. Independent reasoning was turned into heresy. Direct observation was denounced as witchcraft. The abstraction layer’s first priority has always been to make going around it structurally impossible, today what venture capitalists call their “digital moats”, to redefine competence only as fluency in an allowed interface. “She’s a witch! Does she float?” is the comedic version as famously depicted by Monty Python. If a woman had learned how to swim, she was a witch and had to be burned to death. If she hadn’t learned to swim, she drowned. The Church used double-binds to kill those with intelligence and independence:

Brands as Religions, Models as Priests

Shine a proper historical spotlight on Silicon Valley and you should see exactly what AI is doing for the venture capitalists. The priest class had specific structural features: they controlled access to the text, they interpreted it for you, they told you the interpretation was correct, and you had no independent way to verify. The model does all four.

The brand-as-religion parallel explains the loyalty Thompson documents. Those developers aren’t just using a tool. They’re expressing faith. The agent says “Implementation complete!” and they believe it the same way a congregant believes the benediction. One developer maintains what Thompson calls “a stern Ten Commandments” — behavioral rules for his AI agent — and discovers that emotional language mysteriously improves performance without understanding why. That’s not engineering. That’s liturgy.

The dependency structure is identical too. The Church’s power wasn’t primarily theological. It was infrastructural. Once it controlled the hospitals, the schools, the record-keeping, the calendar, you couldn’t leave even if you stopped believing. You were locked in by integration, not conviction. Which is the model provider strategy in plain sight: get into the IDE, the workflow, the deployment pipeline, make yourself the substrate of daily practice. At that point belief is optional. Dependency is sufficient.

Pirsig’s Quality, Descartes’ cogito, the herbalist’s direct knowledge of what the plant does are all the same move. Going around the abstraction layer to touch the thing itself. And in every era, the abstraction layer’s response is the same: make that move unnecessary, then impossible, then unthinkable.

Thompson’s article ends by suggesting that “abstraction may be coming for us all.” He’s right. The question he doesn’t ask is who is represented by those taking control over the public abstraction layer, and what happens to those being forcibly pushed onto the “other” side.

Historian protip: Abstraction layers are the preferred instruments of authoritarians committing mass violence.

Two days before bombs hit Tehran, on February 28th, JD Vance sat in a White House planning meeting and advocated for the most aggressive option on the table: “go big and go fast” was the Vance push, White House sources told the press. Not a limited strike.

Not a diplomatic offramp. All in.

This is the same JD Vance who wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars.”

The same Vance who told a podcast audience in October 2024 that war with Iran would be “a huge distraction of resources” and “massively expensive.”

The same Vance who called himself a “skeptic of foreign interventions” in the Washington Post just one day before the planning meeting where he pushed to escalate to an unprovoked, illegal full scale war with Iran.

The retrospective rewrite and cynical disinformation project is already underway to cover his tracks. Sources “close to the Vice President” told CBS that Vance was “personally against the strikes” but argued that if they happened, the operation should go big. His earnest advocacy for a maximum strike option is in fact what made the “if” question moot. Trump cynically called it “no aborts“.

“Operation Epic Fury is approved,” Mr. Trump said, according to the Times. “No aborts. Good luck.”

The recent Vance disinformation campaign transforms a primary advocate into a reluctant realist. It’s the sad McNamara move of the Vietnam War. Oppose in private as rational, escalate in practice as political, publish the memoir later claiming the escalation was someone else.

How Robert McNamara Came to Regret the War He Escalated: The ‘architect of the Vietnam war’ never formally apologized, but struggled with its consequences for the rest of his life

The evidentiary record already makes this harder to run than McNamara’s Vietnam version.

The Ledger

Read the table again, top to bottom.

That sequence is the argument.

Source Asymmetry

The competing leaks have different credibility profiles. White House sources had no incentive to inflate Vance’s hawkishness. If anything, Trump’s inner circle benefits from showing the VP was on board — it demonstrates consensus, not division. Vance’s people, by contrast, had every incentive to minimize. When two sets of anonymous sources contradict each other, ask who benefits from each version. The answer tells you which one to trust.

Trump himself split the difference on camera, saying he and Vance were “philosophically, a little bit different” but that Vance was “quite enthusiastic.” That’s not a man covering for his VP. That’s a man who doesn’t think there’s anything to cover for. We know Trump and what he does if he sniffs disloyalty to his warmongering.

The Photo

The White House released two photos of Rubio with Trump at Mar-a-Lago as the strikes launched. One photo showed Vance in the Situation Room, the vice-presidential seal where the presidential one normally sits, flanked by Gabbard and Bessent.

He was not sidelined. He was operational.

That image is counterproof to any future claim that he wasn’t really in favor or involved.

The Pattern

Officials who privately oppose a war, then advocate for its most aggressive execution once it becomes inevitable, then retroactively claim they were the voice of caution have a name in the historical record.

The McNamara play.

Robert McNamara’s detailed private doubts about Vietnam didn’t surface usefully until In Retrospect was published in 1995, three decades and millions of deaths after the doubts allegedly began.

Harold Ford’s CIA review of the memoir showed how it worked: McNamara selectively quoted the Board of National Estimates to make it appear they had confirmed the domino thesis, when they had actually questioned it. He cited only the parts that supported his position and omitted the conclusions that contradicted it. Ford correctly called McNamara out for standing history on its head.

The Vance version is already running: CBS sources frame “go big” as a conditional position taken only after personal opposition failed, while the White House sources who were in the room describe advocacy, not reluctance. The selective quotation and disinformation spin hasn’t even waited for a memoir. It’s happening in real time, through Vance unleashing his anonymous source army, before his war is a week old.

The private doubt is not the interesting part, even as it is developed into a footnote. The public action is the actual record, and JD Vance pushed “big” into another endless war. Colin Powell’s private reservations about Iraq didn’t prevent him from delivering the UN presentation that sold the war. We remember him for one and not the other.

Vance built his political career on claiming he opposed exactly the thing he did when tested. The WSJ op-ed, the rally speeches, the podcasts were not offhand remarks. They were the architecture of a brand, which all landed the opposite way of what he said. The brand was cashed in for an unnecessary war he helped escalate without clear objectives.

The Rivalry Frame Is the Trap

Most coverage has fallen into drama about a Vance-Rubio rivalry: who’s up, who’s down, who got the better photo op. That’s the “reality” TV frame of palace intrigue that displaces interest in accountability. Whether Vance or Rubio is better positioned for 2028 doesn’t mean much. The question is actually what Vance advocated in the room on February 28, and whether the war he helped shape matches the war he told Americans would never happen.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, of all people, identified the core issue:

I want to know where the hell is JD Vance… Because if they stand by and are silent, they’re turning their back on the same words they said.

When MTG is the one holding you to your anti-war commitments, the inversion is complete.

Vance’s silence was not indecision, it was disinformation.

He is plotting a way to preserve his anti-war brand for 2028 in the shadow of the war he helped escalate into a quagmire. Generating Trump-like flip-flop ambiguity about where he stands on anything is more valuable to him than clarity. That calculation depends on the war timeline staying blurry.

The timeline is clear. Vance said go big into Iran and he owns it now and forever.

A thread on Bluesky was forwarded to me that compared the US-Israeli war on Iran to the 1956 Suez Crisis, or the “War of Tripartite Aggression” as it’s called by some.

Their argument is we are in America’s Suez moment, and the question is who forces the withdrawal the way Eisenhower forced Britain and France out of Egypt.

It’s wrong. The parallel doesn’t fit. And the reason it’s wrong is far more dangerous if people keep seeing 1956.

1956 Crisis Was Remarkable for the End

President Eisenhower, a seasoned WWII military general, had the motivation and leverage to end the conflict in Suez. That sentence contains two requirements, not one, and both were specific to the architecture of the postwar order.

Eisenhower had personally spent a decade building the global security structure that American hegemony depended on: NATO, SEATO, Bretton Woods, the dollar as reserve currency, bilateral defense agreements across the Middle East. All of it rested on the structural premise that the United States was the sole legitimate authority over when Western military force gets deployed. He led the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany and in history stands as the exact antithesis to Trump.

Britain and France going into Egypt without American authorization wasn’t a policy disagreement. It was an attempt by weakened rival powers trying to reassert colonial-era authority by making war decisions inside the American security perimeter.

If that precedent stood, the entire modern “united” architecture of nations was negotiable.

Eisenhower also had a Soviet timing problem. The Suez invasion came the same week as a dramatic Soviet invasion of Hungary. Eisenhower wanted Hungary for optics to fracture Soviet legitimacy. He could have said look at what empire does, look at the tanks in Budapest, except his own allies were running a colonial invasion in Egypt.

The moral framework justifying the entire Cold War strategy collapsed if the “good” guys were as bad or worse than the Soviets.

The American President flexed, hard, to put the British and French back in their seats. He threatened to dump Britain’s sterling reserves and block IMF support. The threat was specific, credible, and existential to the British economy, from the man who had saved Britain from Hitler. Eden folded within days. Britain and France withdrew. Eisenhower took a moral stand against Germany (he was directly responsible for documentation of the Holocaust) and pivoted it into the definitive end of European colonial military power in the Middle East.

The key word in all of this is architect. Whether or not Eisenhower acted on principle, he was protecting the law and order building he had built. The rules-based international order, which meant the American-dominated order as a result of WWII, was his structure to keep the world spinning safely. He was compassionate, brave and intelligent but more important to history he was willing to defend the laws of conflict.

No Eisenhower Today

The Suez model requires someone who built something, or owns it now, and is willing to sacrifice to protect it. Who stops Trump from repeatedly committing crimes? Look at who holds leverage today and ask whether either condition is met.

China has the most obvious card. They hold over $750 billion in US Treasuries. They’re the manufacturing backbone of the American consumer economy. Iran is already letting Chinese ships through the Strait of Hormuz while blocking Western ones. Beijing owns a mediator’s position without asking for it, and they aren’t saying much. Perhaps they are learning too much about American weakness to stop America from revealing themselves. They could tell Washington: we’ll keep the Strait open for everyone through our relationship with Tehran, but the price is you stop. The problem is for every F-15E shot down by friendly fire, for every American military facility bombed by Iranian drones, China gains invaluable intelligence to defeat an overextended and over budget America.

China also wants a different architecture, not the preservation of this one. They’d play the Eisenhower card to extract concessions, not to restore systemic stability. That makes them a transactional actor, not a global architectural one. Eisenhower sacrificed the special relationship with Britain to protect the legal system of conflict resolution. China is a competitor that would sacrifice the system to improve its position within it.

The EU has the more structurally Eisenhower-shaped tool. The dollar’s reserve currency status depends on European financial institutions continuing to clear through it. If the ECB and European banks started building euro-denominated energy settlement infrastructure, which the Hormuz crisis is practically begging them to do, that’s the slow-motion version of Eisenhower’s sterling threat. Not a dramatic sell-off, but a structural migration that Washington can’t reverse once it starts. We already have seen EU institutional investors unhitch their wagons from Trump.

The European project is, in principle, an architectural bet. The whole thing is a rules-based order scaled to a continent. But the EU spent seventy years subcontracting its security architecture to Washington as a foundation. Using Eisenhower’s leverage means admitting that the contractor went nuts and you need to rebuild it yourself. That’s not a diplomatic adjustment. That’s a civilizational decision, and nothing in the current European leadership suggests that appetite exists beyond rhetoric. Don’t vacation in NYC. Stop using Google. Ok.

So neither has both requirements. China has leverage without architectural motivation. The EU has architectural identity without the urge to use its leverage. And neither has what Eisenhower had most essentially: the position of the expert builder, someone who treats the international order as their own very specific work product rather than something they inherited or hope to replace.

This Is 1940, Not 1956

If 1956 is the model where an architect intervenes, 1940 is the model where nobody does, meaning everyone gets dragged in by the gravity of their own dependencies.

Nobody was motivated to enter a North Africa theater, except Mussolini. Not Hitler. Not the British, who planned a five-day raid and got a three-year campaign. Not the Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Indians, or Free French who fought there. The theater emerged because Mussolini was a horrible impatient fraud who created a cascading failure that no single power had the authority or motivation to stop. Every subsequent actor entered not by choice but by compulsion to stabilize the inherent chaos of fascism. Germany couldn’t let Italy collapse. Britain couldn’t let Egypt fall. The Commonwealth couldn’t let Britain fight alone. The United States couldn’t let the Mediterranean become an Axis lake. And the lesson of Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 hung over all of it; the League of Nations’ failure to act then made the cascading drag-in inevitable later.

That’s the pattern unfolding now.

Iran retaliates against Gulf states that hosted American assets. Qatar stops gas production and declares force majeure. Oil hits $119. European energy security is threatened for the second time in four years. The E3 deploy “defensive” military assets to the region. Insurance companies close the Strait of Hormuz more effectively than the Iranian navy did. China gets preferential transit. Japan begs for strategic reserve releases. Qatar’s energy minister warns that continued war will “bring down economies of the world.”

Every actor is being dragged in by dependencies on stability, not by choice to fight for order. That is the key structure of 1940, unlike 1956.

Builder, Tenant, Arsonist

The reason the Suez parallel attracts is (besides more recent) that it implies a resolution mechanism. Somewhere out there is a hero, a responsible adult with leverage who will call a halt to stupidity of Trump’s toddler-like rants. But the 1956 resolution depended on a specific power relationship and rational actors: the aggressor (Britain) was a junior partner dependent on the intervener (the US). Eisenhower could discipline Eden because Eden needed American financial support to survive, and Eden arguably wasn’t someone who would put an Elon Musk in charge of anything and show up in the Epstein Files.

Trump isn’t even close to being an Eden. He can’t be disciplined by a senior partner because his entire existence is proof he never listens. He’s Mussolini in many ways, the deranged hot-headed initiator whose failures create cascading obligations for everyone else. And Netanyahu isn’t playing a subordinate role that can be overruled from above. He’s the catalyst who understood, correctly, that once the war starts, American sunk costs make withdrawal politically impossible. The junior partner traps the senior partner by making the senior partner’s credibility dependent on the junior partner’s war.

This is exactly how Mussolini and Hitler came to entrench in failures. Italy’s North Africa disaster pulled Germany sideways. If the southern Mediterranean fell, the entire Axis position was open to attack. Hitler committed the Afrika Korps not because it was a German strategy but because Mussolini dragged him. The dependency ran upward.

Someone on Bluesky described the likely outcome as “if Vietnam and the oil crisis had a baby.” That captures the domestic experience of quagmire plus economic shock. Yet the structural model remains 1940: a cascading multi-actor catastrophe where the war becomes everyone’s problem not because anyone decided to make it stop, but because the interdependencies won’t let anyone walk away.

The Slide

I studied this dynamic at the LSE under Professor John Kent in the History department. One of Kent’s major works, British Imperial Strategy and the Origins of the Cold War 1944-49, documented the process by which systemic architectural ownership transfers. He laid out that it only transfers when someone wants the outcome badly enough to pay for it.

His core thesis was that the Cold War’s origins weren’t simply US-Soviet ideological confrontation. They were about the collapse of British imperial architecture and the contest over who would replace it. Britain in 1944-49 was trying to maintain its role as systemic guarantor of the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean security order. This was not out of nostalgia, but because the architecture of British global power ran through Suez, the Gulf, and the Eastern Mediterranean.

I unfortunately remember well trying in a seminar, as a young and dumb student, to convince Professor Kent that America was motivated by oil. Pssshaw he said, warning me sternly that Americans don’t read enough to know their own history, in between bites of a cucumber and cream cheese sandwich.

When Britain couldn’t afford to maintain their role (still struggling from WWII), the US stepped in not out of principle but because the vacuum threatened American interests. Truman took over the British position in Greece and Turkey in 1947 because the alternative was Soviet influence in the Eastern Mediterranean. Eisenhower could discipline Eden at Suez in 1956 precisely because the US had already replaced Britain as the architect. Eden was a tenant trying to act like a boss, and Eisenhower reminded him of the global end of white supremacist doctrines.

Kent’s framework makes the current absence explicit. The Eisenhower moment at Suez wasn’t a one-off act of statesmanship. It was the culmination of a decade-long architectural transfer. And the reason there’s no Eisenhower now is that no equivalent transfer has happened. Nobody has taken ownership of the system the US was supposed to still be capable of running, instead of currently setting itself on fire.

The question Kent taught us to ask wasn’t “why do wars start” but “why do wars spread.” The answer, over and over, is that wars spread when the costs of intervention are high but the costs of non-intervention are structurally higher. Every actor faces a local calculation that makes joining cheaper than staying out, even though the aggregate result is catastrophic for everyone.

That’s where we are. The EU can’t afford another energy crisis but can’t afford to break with Washington. China can’t afford Middle Eastern instability but can’t afford to confront the US directly. Gulf states can’t afford Iranian retaliation but can’t afford to deny the US basing rights. Iran can’t afford to keep fighting but can’t afford to stop while bombs are falling. Everyone’s local logic says “keep going.” Nobody’s structural position says “stop.” That’s a 1940 slide again.

In 1956, one man could stop it because he had built the system and valued it more than any single relationship within it. In 1940, nobody could stop it because nobody had built anything they valued more than their own survival. The system didn’t have an architect. It just had tenants looking around for help while their building was being set on fire.

Mussolini always talked like Trump or even Pete Hegseth. It’s easy, it’s ahead of schedule, breaking all the rules means finishing faster. None of that was or is true. Italy sleepwalked into a three-year, multi-nation war across North Africa and lost everything. Mussolini planned a quick advance to Sidi Barrani. He was hanged.