as Bernoulli said when he received an anonymous solution to the brachistochrone problem that turned out to be Isaac Newton’s, “I recognize the lion by its claw.”

I recognize the claw of the lion in software like Redis, cURL, uv, Ghostty, sqlite, llama.cpp - software that is elegant, well-built, considered and thoughtful. Software that is joyful to use. Software that helps me. I want to write software like this, and I want to use software like this, and I want us as programming people to be incentivized to value the process that creates software like this.

It has, with generative code, become harder and harder to strive towards the lions because the models produce code that is, quite literally, mid, the compressed and weighted average of every excellent Stack Overflow answer, but also questions like, “What happens if the explanatory and response variables are sorted independently before regression?” It is the average of all publicly available software, updated at some cadence and mixed into training data soup and then RLHFed according to some arbitrary metrics, and as such can only offer a ghost of quality.

We are being overrun by mediocrity and sloppiness, we are trying to fight against it, and yet, no matter how good the models and ecosystems around them get, I find myself more and more wanting software that I know is written with humans at the wheel - we are still better at reasoning, at aesthetic judgment, at architecture.

The best code is no code, programming still sucks and always will, and yet, I find myself still searching for the claw, the mark of mastery. Because that mark comes from people who want to reach other people directly. I want to see the claw, because if there is a claw, it means there is a living, breathing lion on the other side of the screen building the software that elevates us and binds us together as a community of software engineers.

— Vicki Boykis, I want to see the claw, Normcore Tech, 2025