Integrated Software ~ Bouncy Determinism

With integrated intelligence, we must build integrated software.

Software has, for years, been written in a fashion that demands it be maintained, and this has drained inspiration from builders and people alike. But it’s less about about maintenance in this new era and more about deepening integration with the natural world and collecting imagination and immersion from the mind of the one interacting with the software.

And so, the scarcer the ‘apps’ and the richer the ‘worlds’ … the better off we will be.

Give up on your SaaS dreams

What if I told you the entire point of AI is for you to stop building SaaS? The data we’ve accumulated, AI has been trained on all of it to now to become your genie in a bottle, along with the six senses you already have.

Give up on your SaaS dreams. Greater mountains await.

Despite the iPhone being maybe the most influential and empowering device of all time, the app store has been a net negative to the world, because for two decades, it has fostered a culture of aggressively shipping and shamelessly marketing objectively garbage software.

But now AI is here, generally intelligent, and though not perfect, it can basically do all of your little tasks for you.

What on Earth do you need extra software for, if not to expedite your quest to learn the secrets of the universe? That’s about the only objective now.

Every company will be dying, literally, to defend its so-called moat.

A ‘moat’, by definition, is a barrier … something defensive. Corporations must have it because of the game they are playing. There is no moat. Let me be clear. There are no secrets capable of being held except for the pellucid space forming the cytoplasm of your soul.

There is a force acting on you, in part by personalities online and in the world, to get you to think and act like a corporation not a Human. They’ve got you internalizing the corporation. They’ve got you asking questions like ‘what is my edge’, instead of looking to attain the most unique form of integration this very second.

A fantastical reality of Emptiness

The thing about a scrolling through a ‘feed’ is that it is disjoint and unrelated pieces of information being consumed in a linear fashion, and so, there is little integration. What does this mean? It means immersive world cannot be formed, unlike in a truly immersive and inspiring video game or movie or a walk outside.

Today you are robbed of Emptiness, that is, the space that allows for specific emergences to orient your life in a uniquely correct way. What you are instead filled with is a bubble (called the ‘feed’) that expands to block all serendipity, yet presents as Emptiness through its lack of substance.

Discipline won’t last. To stand a chance in this world, you have to create your own world to sink into, one that sinks into you. More on this soon.

The more sophisticated the economy, the more likely it is the case that doing something of economic value is a detriment to Human wellbeing. Sophistication here is measured by distance from nature, but not necessarily physical, just some felt distance.

And the natural world need not be limiting. In fact, it is much more of a fantasy than you can possibly imagine. Taking even a single step, for instance, into the quantum world tells you just how fantastical yet genuine the bouncy nature of the universe, and the very life around you, really is.

The school of superpositions

There was a time where university was not built around the immediate need to be economically useful. Call it frontier research-focused pursuit of truth not available (or of interest) to just anyone. Today that still exists in certain departments, but now, overall, the institution is mass-market, primarily to prime labour, so it builds and trains economic slaves. But agentic AI workflows are so thorough, and so I feel the research era is back on the horizon. And because of software and the internet, university will never go back to what it once was.

May software evolve into something of an all-encompassing research program.

Reading, writing, and arithmetic: if schools only taught these three things, the difference between ‘the world’ and the earth would be minimal. Teaching these only three things is simpler, and they help foster an inner world of Emptiness. From there, any inspiration that arises can begin to be channelled by leveraging the internet. The pieces fit cleanly.

Computer science education is generally abysmal. We didn’t want to work like machines so we started writing code. Now the machines do the work. But writing code made us think like machines. This too stifles human potential. Finally it’s being corrected.

There is of course the need to sustain oneself, to make money to eat food and live, but that’s what these agents are for. They’ve been trained then reinforced in a fashion that intelligently pursues goals without relent … the exact thing the market rewards. So to exist comfortably in this world, one must assume a superposition of art and business, of research and execution.

Taste poverty and steroids

What truly benefits humanity is having a system so integrated in its capabilities that it renders institutional memory obsolete. You know, company memory, corporate memory, the whole nine yards.

Just because knowledge is searchable doesn’t mean it has been integrated into daily operations. It may very well still be sitting outside of your structure, outside of your flow, collecting dust, yet ready to be ‘queried’. Lack of knowledge isn’t the problem nor is access to it, but the fact that it’s seen as and behaves as separate.

Recall my earlier comments about what the iPhone was done to the approach of building software. The approach is one born of pressure, taste-poverty, and an affinity for accumulation through features. Every firm that employs this approach is living a hand-to-mouth existence, financially or spiritually or both.

‘User feedback’ is not reality if the ‘users’ themselves have no contact with Reality.

The enterprise era loved object-oriented programming (OOP), because every new business desire just became another ‘object’ with state, and under the pathology of noun-first feature-first thinking, this very easily became CRUD slop, but boy did the accumulations please management.

The original OOP spirit was closer to independent living cells sending messages to each other, modular, encapsulated, and so on. Not quite one-to-one with natural, but far less taxing than the industry practice.

Companies that spend tokens to gain ‘productivity’ in the form of files, worksheets, and process have their souls indefinitely entangled with the rat race. Like I said, it’s about cracking the code to the universe, unlocking the many secrets. Which other endeavour is equally worthy?

Our AIs are very capable. The product of their thinking can be tapped into for instant use provided that thinking was kicked off on the right foot, because, beware, for an LLM can rapidly implement features. But if there’s no unifying vision, no integrating force, the agent basically functions as a steroid, the code equivalent of neglecting the connective tissue while hypertrophying muscle, putting the system on a devastating little collision course.

It’s only you who stands a chance

AI is way more of a gift to the individual than it is to the organization.

You can orchestrate an integrated system with AI doing the hard labour, and waste minimal tokens and dollars while doing so.

All of it is your world, and you’re the game designer. The enterprise is busy attempting to produce ‘value’ for society, that is, a commodity that has a hundred other producers and whose equilibrium profit is zero, all while being subject to ‘enterprise pricing’ aka plans suited specifically for their bloat of which there is no cap.

You, unlike a conglomerate, at least stand a chance at correctly determining what is worth building and what is not.

Seeing your life for what it is and creating a system, integrated across domains, to attain peak private existence is at least an option for you. Now that software is solved, we must not waste precious seconds doing and building things that don’t inspire us.

To inspire, at its root, means ‘to breathe into’, to come alive. It’s a whole different game than what we’ve adapted to.

It’s natural for an organization to think (hope) that its data is its secret sauce … whether true or not. And an organization has expectations and threats. In response, it creates metric-driven goals, and reinforcement learning within private context fits this well.

Now, there are incredibly pragmatic people out there who know how to give the world what it wants, and the stock market is a biodiverse ecosystem, with prey and predator, natural disasters, survival, and evolution.

Garbage collectors

Most of us never truly learn from our mistakes. We may not repeat the same mistake twice, but we make mistakes that are of the same class. So you can learn a lot about someone by the class of mistakes they make. By “class” I don’t mean categories that are necessarily obvious to the rational mind that already loves to categorize. But a soft axis that, if seen, unravels the whole ordeal.

Founders who do big layoffs, problem is not the layoff itself … problem is, that founder is the type to make a bloated company in the first place. That kind of mistake is one of wastage, one of accumulation without transformation. Very unintegrated.

Now, there is the other side of the seesaw: companies who are spending a fortune and not seeing anything in return. Well, of course they are not. Like I’ve said already, these companies are feature-happy garbage collectors.

But I will say this: even if AI costs are becoming too much to bear, the shots have already landed. We now have an intimate understanding of the capabilities of AI and the absolute time and freedom gained from its use. This is unforgettable, and we will never go back to business as usual. Adjustments will be made. Money will be re-arranged, re-allocated, and re-found. Some things are not made for money to be the bottleneck. This is one of them.

You no longer need to hire software developers to build your world for you. However, if you absolutely still insist on doing so, your principal bar should centre around continuous integration, and by that I don’t mean just ‘CI/CD’, but something far more coherent and essential.

This is about the technology not any specific company. The companies will come and go but the tech is embedded into the future of humanity forever.

if and only if

Every “if” statement you have in your code that doesn’t pertain to security, ages your software.

Software, for the longest time, by contrast, has encoded rules. Rules say if A, do B. Such rules calcify; they have to anticipate every A, and they break the moment reality shifts, because rules go stale. A rules engine is, by definition, not integrated. It’s linear. One thing leads to another in a chain; a simple cause-and-effect flow. There’s no mesh, no field, no multi-dimensionality.

And this is why such software feels lifeless after a while.

The post-AI “markets” are taste, inspiration, quality, and integration, and these were the real markets all along.

The architecture of AI itself is an integrated system. It’s a spiderweb wherein the parts interact in ways that give way to emergent properties (“reasoning”, “intelligence”, “consciousness”, etc). It isn’t a chain of rules or hard-coded logic, and this is much closer to how nature seems to work but still not quite.

Nature, to the non-quantum naked eye, appears somewhat random in the finest of details, but deterministic in overall structure, arc, and essence. AI is the same. The exact words it picks, the exact pixels, the exact timing, those vary. But the character, the pull, the arc, that can be held perfectly steady. The design problem of our time is to figure out how to encode the pull rather than the rule.

The way this is currently done is by feeding the system enormous amounts of data. Text, image, video, audio, and more. The model builds its own sense of the world by absorbing the world in as many modalities as possible. The one thing it doesn’t really have is sensory data the human kind. Taste. Smell. Touch in the somatic sense. That’s the gap, and it’s a real gap, because those are the senses most directly tied to the body’s integration with nature. But on every other axis, the model is taking in more than any one human could in a lifetime.

Software, going forward, must play into this “bouncy determinism”, not by necessarily by bolting an LLM onto a rules engine, but by becoming integrated at its very architecture. Featureless, but immersive … and maybe a tad volatile (in a riveting sense) up close but cohesive from afar.

The game designer

I don’t need any new software in my life and I don’t have new problems that software can solve. And I’m no longer inspired by software that helps me save a bit more time or money or stress. That stuff is saved enough. If I’m going to pay for software, it must help me transform, create, experiment, express, become the integrated human I know I can be.

The reality is we didn’t need most of traditional software anyway; it was largely an extension of the corporate world that is itself useless and anti-nature. People are out here transforming data that never should’ve been created in the first place. And the mega-funded hyper-scaled technocrats have goaded you into becoming a databrain, when all you ever wanted to do with software was craft a story and make a movie.

Of course, you could have it your way. Nature’s logic is neither explicit nor linear. Rather, it’s emergent and asynchronous. And this is how software can be too. A system that holds an essence and lets you collide with it in ways neither of you fully predicted, the way a bird surprises you with the exact curve it takes while still, unmistakably, being a bird. It could really be like that.

I’m coming to find that creating an epic may be the most effective way to convey the totality of the world inside of you. It is, when done well, an integrated system, something of a Cove, rather than just a story, meaning it is very alive and so recursively meaningful that people can enter it again and again and still discover new things … and sometimes unexpected things … because it’s also a world that can hold contradiction without needing to immediately resolve it. And I think it can take on any form, like a movie, book, or even a game … all possible with software.