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Programming in the 41st Millenium

January 30, 2025

I’ve been getting back into Warhammer recently and it got me thinking about the (dark) future of AI-generated code.

So, Warhammer is a universe shared across several different games and genres, but it’s most popular setting is the grimdark future of the 41st Millenium. What was interesting for me to rediscover as a programmer watching new AI coding tools appear all the time was their take on technology. In the 41st Millenium there are no more scientists or engineers, but rather tech-priests. Instead of creating new technology to solve problems they might face, those tech-priests try to harness existing technology to suit their needs. They’re not creators anymore, but merely sheperds and maintenance staff.

The way those tech-priests interact with machines is by using ancient rites and incantations, hoping that it will make a machine work as they’d like to, or be fixed. That sounds to me awful similar to an idea of shell scripts being passed down through generations that nobody knows anymore what they do and how they work, but they have a vague idea which one to run in a given situation.

Of course, that’s not a prognosis of what will happen in any way. That’s a literary trick - by creating a world where technology is akin to magic we get a world where technology can do anything and nobody (especially not the writer!) has to explain how it does it.

But this being a literary trick rather than a forecast doesn’t make it an unreasonable version of the future. Once we get AI-tools that we can delegate lower-level programming to (probably not the LLM-based generation), we’ll stop writing the code ourselves. And, as it usually happens, we’ll use those new tools to build on top of existing ones. We already know how even seemingly trivial errors are hard to fix once enough people started using the code. A spelling error from 30 years ago is still a part of the protocol that’s the base of all web traffic nowadays. So, once the next generation of AI tools will build on the layer created by earlier AI we’ll get to a point where it’s impossible to even see the bottom of this Jenga tower and all the code that you’d be able to debug is AI-generated and nobody knows what it really does anymore. You’ve suddenly become a tech-priest.

So, what do tech-priests do? They travel the world in search of tech that’s out there and possibilities that it might bring them. In the world of Warhammer those are obviously weapons, but what’s less obvious is that they’re usually ancient. That was shocking to me the first time I came across this idea. Imagine nowadays somebody finding an ancient weapon, what would that be? A musket? A trebuchet? The only ancient weapons that would still be somewhat viable today would maybe be swords made from damascus steel, or katanas forged by ancient Japanese masters.

In Warhammer that’s not the case, the lore of this universe mentions thousands years old cannons capable of destroying whole worlds that can’t be created anymore. Why wouldn’t they be? Well, the main thing is probably that we never could create them in the first place. But at some point in time there was a machine / program that could. However, this machine or program either does not exist anymore, or has moved on to doing different things and there’s nothing we tech-priests can do about it anymore. In the world where innovation happens “by itself” I can imagine such technological cul-de-sac be something increasingly more common.

Modern equivalents could be programs created by prompting old models, which were later rendered obsolete by infinite copyright lawsuits. Leaving us with an artifact that exists, but can be impossible to recreate or improve anymore.

So, this left me thinking: are we doomed to a world where technology is not something we do, but something that happens to us?


Written by Wojciech Ogrodowczyk who takes photos, climbs mountains, and runs Brains & Beards to help companies deliver better mobile applications faster.

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