There Shall Be Cathedrals - by Zac Hill
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There Shall Be Cathedrals<br>On the falling — and thereby rising — cost of being insanely good at your job.
Zac Hill<br>May 01, 2026
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Michael Ostendorfer, Die Schöne Maria zu Regensburg, c. 1519-20<br>A homie of mine, as a side project, is conducting a serious industrial-base diagnostic on what it would take for the United States and its allies to build a thirty-foot bipedal combat robot.<br>His current draft cites, by document number, GAO reports and Defense Science Board studies and a 1983 National Academy of Sciences report on the collapse of American machine-tool manufacturing. It excludes the People’s Republic of China per the Defense Production Act, NSIBR, and DFARS regulations — but it includes Korean industrial capital inside the U.S. industrial base via the Hanwha Philly Shipyard, which Hanwha bought in 2024. All of this is rendered in a crisp, visually-distinctive typographic register that looks like 1972 IBM improbably bred with 1942 trade-journal masthead. The project also generates its own reading syllabus, sourced from the citations, in case you want to verify any of it.<br>He did all of this himself. In his spare time. While getting, like, a good night’s sleep.<br>Said homie’s name is Emmet Penney. He’s a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, where he focuses on infrastructure and energy policy, and hosts a popular podcast called Nuclear Barbarians. Other résumé-padding? Former editor-in-chief of Grid Brief. Contributing editor at Compact Magazine. Multiple Emergent Ventures grants, a Robert Novak journalism fellowship, work that’s appeared in American Affairs and Claremont Review of Books.<br>He is, in other words, a working professional in a serious policy domain who — not to get too online too fast — codes as much more of a ‘wordcel’ than a ‘shape rotator.’<br>But he has also, in roughly the last year, become one of the most concretely fluent individual users of frontier AI tools I know. The Gundam project is the most extreme example. There are many others.<br>I got him on the phone for an hour this past Monday to nerd out about all this, mainly because it’s cool as hell, but also because one big question couldn’t stop nagging at me ever since I saw the first outlines of his first jawbone-unhinging dashboard prototype.<br>That question was: am I actually interested in becoming — with real, but manageable effort — way better at my job?<br>Should I be?<br>Should you?
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I’m going to invite you to navigate your browser to this here URL. Then I’m going to ask you to bear with me for a second.<br>What you’re looking at is a navigable map of Illinois. Eleven operating nuclear reactors — more than any other state. The only commercial away-from-reactor wet spent-fuel storage facility in the country. Class I railroads, navigable waterways, the Strategic Highway Network corridors that the Department of Defense certifies for heavy industrial transport. Two national labs. Three university nuclear programs. The brownfield sites at Zion and Dresden 1 — decommissioned, but permitted, sitting there waiting.<br>Each layer toggles. Each pin clicks. The sidebar walks you, criterion by criterion, through the Department of Energy’s January 2026 Request for Information for a Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus and explains how Illinois meets each one. Every claim is sourced. Every dataset is cited. The flat typography and decisive visual hierarchy convey, before you’ve read a sentence, that someone with a point of view made it.<br>What this tool does, functionally, is make the question of whether Illinois is a serious candidate for a multi-billion-dollar federal nuclear campus answerable in five minutes by a person who is not a nuclear engineer.<br>How do I know? Well, among other reasons, the state response team submitted Emmet’s GitHub link alongside their formal RFI submission to the DOE.<br>Now, this is all very inside baseball. Nobody really cares what an RFI is. But that’s sort of on us, because that RFI might be the reason a whole-ass nuclear campus gets built on Site A rather than Site B — the mobilization of hundreds of millions of dollars and century-scale infrastructure powering homes and offices and factories and the laptops upon which we read Substack posts like this one.<br>The mechanic that lit the spark of all of this — what got the entire process started — was, until January, a simple PDF file. That was the state of the art.<br>Until, pardon the expression, Emmet went nuclear.<br>A year ago, this kind of artifact would have involved a six-figure consulting engagement with a six-month timeline and a bunch of developers you’d need to herd like mewlings into product meetings. Now it’s something a guy can whip up for fun between anime episodes.<br>Out the other end pop about eight billion kilowatt hours of energy annually. Stick that in an annual report.<br>On the one hand, this is all just straightforwardly impressive. But on the other, it feels revolutionary — in...