looking at things
Joined October 2013
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A huge amount of what we call engineering progress is actually accumulated historical contingency, institutional inertia, vendor incentives, arbitrary conventions, and human cognitive limitations masquerading as technical necessity.
We've confused three things:
1. Fundamental complexity — constraints imposed by physics, mathematics, and the actual problem.
2. Accidental complexity — constraints imposed by historical decisions, incompatible standards, legacy systems, and organizational habits.
3. Manufactured complexity — constraints deliberately preserved because they create competitive moats, professional gatekeeping, switching costs, or recurring revenue.
AI could become extraordinarily effective at separating these.
And once you can reliably distinguish them, much of modern engineering starts looking absurd.
5. Electrical engineering: legacy interfaces everywhere
USB variants, power connectors, voltage conventions, industrial communication protocols, proprietary charging interfaces, incompatible smart-home ecosystems.
Some diversity reflects real physical needs. Much reflects independent evolution and commercial incentives.
6. Building construction: the civilization-sized inefficiency
Plumbing, HVAC, electrical wiring, insulation, structural systems, and building controls are often designed and installed as separate disciplines.
The result is a vast collection of coordination problems, incompatible components, site-specific improvisations, and labor-intensive processes.
Imagine optimizing buildings as integrated physical systems rather than collections of professional trades and vendor catalogs.
There's a common mechanism here: human civilization has been optimizing locally with limited intelligence and limited coordination for centuries.
The result isn't a globally optimized technological civilization. It's an enormous archaeological site of decisions.
1. Software development: the collapse of framework folklore
The "intellectual" energy going into
React vs. Vue vs. Angular vs. Svelte
REST vs. GraphQL vs. RPC
Microservices vs. monoliths
Functional vs. object-oriented programming
Hundreds of competing state-management approaches
Build tools, package managers, linters, formatters, dependency systems
Some differences are substantive. Many are contextual, historical, or aesthetic.
An extremely capable AI could establish which architectures actually minimize complexity, defects, latency, and maintenance costs for a given workload.
The likely outcome is the entire framework abstraction layer might become unnecessary if machines can directly produce, verify, optimize, and maintain the desired behavior.
It increasingly feels like the sensible dev setup is the crypto hot/cold wallet model, but for PCs.
Cold PC: secrets, private data, sensitive work.
Hot PC: LLMs, web search, npm install, untrusted code.
Supply-chain attacks and 0-days make treating your dev machine as trusted feel increasingly naive.
Companies should do more of this: set a standard for yourself, then make it public.
And most importantly stick to it.
In probably 3 years you’ll be able to watch your family history as a movie.
Not a slideshow of old photos. An actual reconstruction of where your ancestors lived, what the streets looked like, how they dressed, where they moved, who they married.
Built from photos, records, letters, maps and whatever else survived.
A family tree you can watch.
1/ I built @kombuse_labs — an open-source desktop app for managing AI coding agents with a local issue tracker.
Runs on SQLite, integrates with Claude Code and Codex and makes everything available via MCP for the tools and IDEs you already use. No cloud setup.
Here's what it does and why:
10/ Transparency
NO MAGIC
Sessions are inspectable — full system prompts, invocation traces, which agent called what, which permissions were granted.
Layered levels of details:
tickets = why: high level management of tasks
sessions = how: available to inspect and analyze one by one or batched
Productive and mostly autopilot, but never a black box, a loop running for hours, or nested sub agent calls invisible to user.
11/ Give it a try
Local-first.
Private by default.
MIT licensed.
github.com/KombuseLabs/kombu…
kombuse.dev