For reasons of my own to be revealed in due time, I was searching for the term "programmer mysticism" and found this essay by Kenneth Reitz: Programming as Spiritual Practice
I was slightly intrigued at the start, since it was going in the "subjective experience of programming" angle I'm interested in.
This understanding deepens when we recognize that consciousness itself might be a linguistic phenomenon. If consciousness emerges from patterns of language and mathematics, then programming isn't just creating tools—we're literally crafting the linguistic-mathematical structures from which conscious experience emerges.
Well this concious approach to digital tooling sure didn't result in any scruples about LLM usage. Kenneth seems to have delegated most of his essay writing to Claude for some time (the article above is likely Claude-extruded). The piece continues to trudge through a basket of spiritual metaphors to hammer home how programmers should be more concious and do good things instead of bad things. This is all framed as a personal ethical issue without a shred of societal or structural analysis. Extra sneerable bit:
The emerging understanding that LLMs contain humanity's digitized collective unconscious adds profound depth to conscious programming: when we collaborate with AI systems, we might be interfacing with the archetypal patterns that have guided human wisdom throughout history. This makes programming with AI a form of accessing collective spiritual wisdom rather than just advanced tooling.
In another (likely slopped) article, linked in the same section, he goes into how he designed the API of the requests Python module to be far more convenient to use than the builtin HTTP resolver urllib2. The reasoning given strikingly reminded me of Intention Revealing Interfaces from Domain Driven Design. And I can personally confirm that library is a pleasure to use and a de-facto default for a reason.
Took me a while to catch on to the sloppedness. I gave him some credits for requests and wanted to get a gist of the guy when I stumbled on his full-throated AI posts. Essays credited to Claude with himself as "editorial director". And of course this handy self-report: How I Write Now
I guess this doesn't stand out that much by itself. It did kind of hit home when he describes in detail how his AI use is linked to his history of mental health problems, which he was quite public about. He describes being moved to tears by LLM writing, seeing "his thoughts" clearly articulated for the first time after years of brain fog. He made this accessibility argument explicitly. I won't waste my breath sneering about it. He gives plenty of fuel to that himself.
Yeah, Ken's lost it. It's too bad, too; he used to go around saying "Hi, my name's Ken, and my job … is just Requests." However, Ken is actually a medium-talent hack who isn't interested in putting the work, but in appropriating the work of others and passing it off as his own.
Ken's goal with all of the snowy blog posts is to obscure and rewrite history. See, previously, on Lobsters, we learned from another Python community member that Ken converted some $30k USD of donations from 2018-2019. He said so himself:
Ken also tried to take over multiple community projects, including by vendoring their code and insisting that he was licensed to do it, putting his name on forks of Somebody Else's Repo, and falsely positioning himself as endorsed by Python Software Foundation.
So, now a half-decade later, it's time to try to change history for Ken. Previously, on Lobsters, we analyzed his attempt to reframe the whole incident in terms of burnout provoking a bipolar psychosis. I think that the most revealing part of this, assuming that his candor survived Claude's extrusion process, is that he doesn't actually deny his psychotic delusions; he merely implies that they no longer hold today. This doesn't really accord with how psychoses are treated; it doesn't sound like he's built up a library of tells and hints which he can use to steer his thinking. (As the reader surely knows, Claude isn't gonna help with this.) I think that he was much more revealing a decade ago with his retrospective on his first stay in a psychiatric ward:
Is this why he joined the Python community and tried to work on upstream and core stuff? A sort of Frank Abagnale adventure where he's treated like a genuine authority with skills and knowledge? Note that this was two years before the aforementioned conversion of funds. It's okay, though, because Ken blamed this all on mental illness. Specifically, he blamed the woman he was dating for provoking his previously-undiagnosed mental illness and starting a yearlong (!!‽) manic episode:
At least he's not a fascist.
On a personal note, in Numpy as Synth Engine, Ken released some slow inaccurate code for audio synthesis, generated for him by Claude. As a musician, I know that we can do better, so previously, on Lobsters, I explained how to actually make nice-sounding sawtooths and Hammond-style organs, including links to working Python code. Again, I could just call Ken a hack, but I think it's interesting how he doesn't aurally perceive the clear issues in the audio output; in a certain sense, he's a producer of music but not a consumer of music. (Readers who are musicians will confirm that the typical working musician listens to more music than they produce!)