education
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Essay
Software engineering does so little epistemic work that it hardly earns the name “engineering.” The field has never learned to distinguish provenance — where an artifact came from — from warrant — why anyone is entitled to rely on it. Authorship, a passing test suite, and a completed review are routinely mistaken for the second when they are only ever the first; libraries are the rare exception, where warrant is actually constructed and amortized across users who never read the source. LLM-generated code inherits neither comforting story, and the discomfort that provokes is not a new problem but the oldest one in the profession, finally felt without the anaesthetic that provenance usually supplies.
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Essay
Curricula in mathematics and the sciences optimize for procedural fluency — the half of what they teach that decays once the student stops being a student. What survives twenty years on is conceptual residue, generated only as an accidental byproduct of the curriculum’s intended work. The asymmetry compounds across generations of teachers and produces a population unable to do the work that civic life requires of it.