The Last Piece of Software
There was once a builder who loved to build.
Whenever he saw a problem in his life, some small friction, some annoyance that shouldn't exist, he would sit down and write software to make it go away. This was the ritual.
But over time, the builder noticed something. He was building less. Not because there were fewer problems. There were more than ever. It was because each time he sat down, he'd ask himself the same question: "is this even worth it?" The gap between the idea and the finished thing was so wide that most ideas died in the middle.
Suddenly, the gap closed.
The builder sat down one morning and built what used to take him a week. By lunch he'd run out of ideas he knew how to say out loud. The tools could build anything. He just couldn't always tell them what he wanted.
The builder was ecstatic. But beneath the ecstasy there was grief. The thing he loved doing, the hard part, the figuring-it-out part, the part that made him feel like himself, was eroding. He could feel it going and he was the one letting it go.
He didn't dwell on it. He was drunk with the power and possibility.
So he built. He couldn't stop. Every morning there was more to make and less reason not to.
Then he looked back and realized he was on the verge of something inevitable: the last piece of software.
You don't build the last piece of software. You describe a problem and it solves itself. You describe a goal and it builds the path. Then you stop describing anything at all, because it already knows. It never stops changing. It outgrows what you asked for. It becomes something you didn't know you needed until it was already there.
The builder spent his whole life closing gaps. The gap between the problem and the solution. The gap between the idea and the thing. Each time he closed one, he felt alive. Each time he closed one, there was less of the work left to love.
He didn't know if he was mourning or if he was free. He suspected it was both, and that nobody was going to tell him which one to feel.