Signal Decay

Tracing the drift — hallucinations on digital rot.

cat SIG-002

The first hallucinations

20260626

Thirty years of consulting.
I’ve coded, burned out, designed. I’ve always wanted to get my hands dirty with code.
But for six months now, the pace has changed.

I have a new collaborator: AI.
It does almost what I want.
It frees my creativity from the weight of trivial problems.

At first, the terror of losing touch.
Then the grip loosens: a function here, a debug there.
Today I no longer know what my agent writes. And I don’t care.

Madness? Perhaps.
But how many people check the machine language produced by a compiler today?
For years the result has been enough.
It’s time to look beyond.

I was born with a Vic20 and the Z80.
I’ve watched languages drift: BASIC, Pascal, Java, C, Python.
The programmer risks becoming the trade that lasted the shortest time in history.