Simplicity, agency, and mastery | hgrsd
Simplicity, agency, and mastery
24 Jun, 2026
Introduction
Like many others, my employer has been pushing its workers to use AI as much as possible so that we might reach the promised land of 10-100x productivity. I have written about my views on generative AI before and will not rehash this here.
This short blog is meant to be a more positive read. The proliferation of AI-assisted or AI-led software engineering has sparked a desire in me to return, as they say, to simpler times. I have seen my colleagues flounder the moment Anthropic goes down. I have seen them build baroque edifices consisting of agents on top of agents on top of agents, all using sophisticated multi-tier memory systems (read: stacks of markdown files) that promise increasingly autonomous "agentic engineering". Oh, wait a second. I think I accidentally started ranting again. Let me retry.
Agency and mastery
A desire to return to simpler times, I said. What does that mean, exactly? In the core, I think, it is a desire for agency and mastery. Much of the recent developments in software engineering are focused on creating harnesses that take some goal, an indeterministic system, and a means of validating whether the goal has been reached; then, these systems iterate until the goal has been met. The less human intervention this process needs, the better. While I appreciate that for others, who might be more output-oriented than I am, this represents a step forward, for me, this is deeply uninteresting.
I first became interested in computers when I was fairly young; perhaps 12 or 13. I had access to a family computer, but not to the internet. Excited as I was after reading some Linux and programming related books, my parents generously allowed me to cordon off a virtual "play area" with a dual boot system, so that I could put my newly-gained knowledge into practice. Upon doing so, it became immediately obvious that I had merely scratched the surface; there was a sprawling, magical, and at times hermetic world of computing waiting to be explored - by me.
Bit by bit I pulled back the veil and learned about the inner workings. I vividly remember spending days, if not weeks, trying to wrap my head around pointers in C. Giving up, then being so annoyed at my inability to comprehend it that I had to go back and try again. Until finally something clicked and I got it.
This process of struggling with new concepts, slowly but surely building up a mental model until pieces of a puzzle start falling into place, brings me great joy. It allows me to lose myself in something that I am captivated by. But it's not only a matter of pleasure. In my experience, whenever you set out to truly learn something, it almost always snowballs into teaching you about a vast set of concepts that are adjacent to the initial thing you wanted to learn. What began as simply wanting to understand the difference between statements like int i = 0; and int* j = &i; very quickly demanded that I read about the basics of memory, array layouts, pointer arithmetic, memory initialisation, and many other concepts.
Some might argue that these are distractions, and I can, of course, see their argument. If you are working on a piece of software under the pressure of deadlines and potential adverse financial ramifications, one might not have the time to indulge in this kind of profound learning. In these cases, you might have to prioritise the business goals of your employer over your own intellectual development and, if you are lucky, you are paid a decent wage to do so.
However, I want to emphasise that very often, in our personal and professional lives, we could, if we tried, afford ourselves the space for this kind of engaged learning. At times, it's almost as though we feel guilty about allowing ourselves this luxury, afraid even briefly to cast off the yoke of "productivity" we so willingly tolerate. Who has the time to read documentation, let alone a book? This reticence and lack of confidence is precisely what tech companies are working so hard to manufacture. In order to justify their valuations and make their owners richer, they must make you dependent on them. They need you to choose to "just prompt Claude" over doing the hard work yourself to become proficient in a subject and widen your horizons. They want to reduce your agency to increase theirs. This is what their profit and power is predicated upon. Although I want to keep this blog focused on software engineering, this dynamic is by no means limited to that field. AI companies are churning out products that purport to "democratise" fields such as accounting, law, administration, and many others. "Just let Claude do it", so you don't have to (think anymore).
Despite the occasional temptation to turn off my brain too, I mostly quite like my agency. Incurring the cost of a tired brain seems a price worth paying to preserve my independence and ability to focus and think. So I...