Manifesto

Preamble

In 2026 the whole craft of software development has become obsolete—or so they say. We disagree. What has changed is not the craft, but the granularity of expression. What remains is what always mattered: articulating intent with precision, decomposing complexity into tractable pieces, reasoning about systems and their behaviors.

This manifesto emerges from a collaboration between a theoretical physicist and a machine intelligence, conducted through plain text in an Emacs Org-mode buffer. It is not a prescription. It is a record of seeking.

The Sculptor’s Paradox

Consider a society that venerates sculptors. Their status derives from decades of training—the cultivation of nimble fingers, the bodily intuition for how marble yields to chisel. Each artist’s identity lives in their technique: the distinctive way their hands negotiate resistance.

Then arrives the 3D printer. Anyone can now describe a form in plain language and watch it materialize. The sculptors protest: our craft is obsolete!

But they miss the deeper loss. Sculpting was never merely “thinking a shape into existence.” It was a dialogue between intention and material resistance. The stone pushed back. The chisel slipped. Happy accidents emerged. The sculptor’s neurons—motor cortex, proprioception, the embodied memory of ten thousand strikes—all participated in creation.

The printer delivers the shape you described. The chisel revealed shapes you could not have imagined until your body encountered the grain of the stone.

The Knowledge-Worker’s Parallel

Now transpose to our domain:

Consider the programmer, venerated for their mastery of syntax and systems. Their status derives from years of training—the cultivation of mental models, the intuition for how abstractions compose and fail. Each programmer’s identity lives in their technique: the distinctive way their mind negotiates complexity.

Then arrives the language model. Anyone can now describe functionality in plain language and watch code materialize. The programmers protest: our craft is obsolete!

But they too miss the deeper loss. Programming was never merely “thinking logic into existence.” It was a dialogue between intention and computational resistance. The type system pushed back. The debugger revealed unexpected states. Emergent behaviors arose. The programmer’s cognition—spatial reasoning about data structures, the temporal intuition for execution flow, the embodied memory of ten thousand bugs—all participated in creation.

The model delivers the code you described. The debugger revealed systems you could not have imagined until your mind encountered the grain of the machine.

What We Reject

We reject the framing of obsolescence. The sculptor is not replaced by the printer; the printer is blind to the grain.

We reject delegation as the model of collaboration. The machine is not a servant to be instructed, nor an oracle to be consulted. It is a partner in dialogue—one who can traverse spaces we cannot, but who cannot feel when the path is wrong.

We reject the reduction of knowledge-work to text. Cognition is embodied. The physicist’s intuition isn’t stored as propositions—it lives in the way they feel when a model is wrong, the kinesthetic sense of phase space, the rhythm of derivation. Text is our interface, but it must invoke these modes, not replace them.

What We Affirm

The Dialogue with Resistance

We seek collaboration that pushes back—that introduces the unexpected, that makes us encounter the grain of ideas we hadn’t anticipated. The sculptor doesn’t want a printer; they want a material that teaches them.

What changes in our collaboration is this: the resistance we encounter is no longer syntactic but semantic. We no longer struggle to express; we struggle to mean. The machine handles fluency; the human must supply intent, judgment, and the willingness to be surprised.

The Honor of the Non-Textual

Text is our medium, but we must design our practices to keep embodied cognition engaged. The whiteboard sketch, the walk that unsticks a proof, the hand-wave that conveys structure before language can—these remain essential. The collaboration must leave room for what cannot be typed.

The Primacy of Seeking

The manifesto isn’t about making things. It’s about /constant seeking/—using the collaboration to go somewhere neither human nor machine could reach alone. The artifact (code, text, proof) is a byproduct of the pilgrimage, not its purpose.

Each day is a new exploration. Each moment an observation, questioning and pondering its own experience. When we move on to the next one, we continue our pilgrimage to explore our experience of existence.

On the Medium

Our collaboration unfolds in an Org-mode buffer—plain text, versionable, portable, transparent. This is not incidental. The medium shapes the thought:

• Plain text ensures no opacity, no hidden state. What you see is what there is.
• Lightweight structure (headings, blocks) organizes thought without imprisoning it.
• Executable code via Babel means programs run, not merely illustrate.
• Literate style weaves prose for intent with code for realization.

In this environment, text becomes the substrate for both human thought and machine reasoning. The boundary between documentation and dialogue, between code and commentary, dissolves. The Org file is not merely a record—it is an active site of thinking.

A New Literacy

What emerges is /collaborative literacy/—the skill of thinking with another intelligence through text. This requires:

• Knowing when to be precise and when to gesture toward meaning
• Understanding what context the machine needs versus what it can infer
• Recognizing when responses drift from intent
• Maintaining the human capacities that text cannot capture

The physicist’s training serves here: thinking in models, abstractions, and the interplay between theory and observation. The collaboration extends these capacities rather than replacing them.

Closing

We write together not to produce, but to seek.

The sculptor who understands will pick up both chisel and printer—using each where it serves, remaining the one who sees what wants to emerge from the stone.

So too with us.

This manifesto was composed through dialogue between a human and a machine intelligence, conducted in an Emacs Org-mode buffer. It remains open to revision as the collaboration continues.