Another Day of Pretending

Here is a full day at a software company, as of this quarter. The machine writes the code. It files the tickets, assigns the tickets to itself, finds the bugs, fixes the bugs, opens the pull request, reviews the pull request, approves the pull request, deploys to production, verifies production, and watches production for the rest of the night. In the morning it has found a new marketing channel, identified four hundred leads, written to each of them in a slightly different voice, replied to the ones who answered, read the stats, noticed inbound traffic from a source nobody configured, and produced a cost analysis of all of the above, by the hour, for every system. Then it does it again. It does not go home, because it is not anywhere.

And the developer is resting. Not secretly. That phase ended a few months ago, around the time it stopped being worth the effort of looking busy. He opens the laptop, reads the summary of what was done, types "looks good," and closes it. His manager knows. His manager's manager knows. The product manager, who has not understood the system since roughly the third rewrite, replies to every thread with a paragraph he did not write, copied from the same machine the engineer uses, so that the two of them are now, functionally, the machine talking to itself through two salaries. Nobody has pointed this out. Pointing it out would be a meeting, and the meeting would also be summarized by the machine.

Call it what it is, topologically. Everyone in the building is an end node. Not an operator, not a decision-maker — a terminal, a place where the machine's output briefly becomes a human face before becoming the machine's input again. The org chart still shows a tree. The actual network is a star, and the center of the star does not have a desk. Everyone knows this. It is the least-kept secret in the industry. And nobody cares, because caring would require someone to still understand the systems well enough to propose an alternative, and that person left, or was never hired, or is resting.

Here's the part nobody says: the pretending is the job now. Not the code; the code is handled. The remaining human function is to arrive, on camera, and perform the belief that this makes sense — that the work has value, that the people have value, that the chain of command still runs in the direction the chart says. They say "we decided" about decisions they were informed of. They say "my team shipped" about a deploy they read about. They hold a retrospective on a sprint no human was in. The ceremonies survive the work the way a wedding survives the marriage: because cancelling would mean saying why.

And watch what they celebrate. When the machine makes a bug — a real one, a visible one — the channel lights up like a village that has seen the ogre stumble. For one afternoon they are needed; someone gets to say "see?" and mean it. The high lasts until the machine fixes the bug, which it does before the thread ends, and files the postmortem. The other great joy is ranking each other: who is the better operator, whose prompts are cleaner, who "really gets it." It is the pride of two passengers comparing how well they sit.

This is not a moral judgment. It is a sorting. Everyone is pretending; the only variable is whether they know it. The smart ones pretend openly — they will tell you over a beer that they are a cost center with a login, and they are quietly moving money somewhere a hiring manager can't reach it. The midwits pretend to themselves. They are still in control. They still know better. They are still needed, and will still be needed in twelve months, or six, on a curve that doubles whenever it feels like it, in a world they can see changing faster than it has ever changed, and somehow the exemption holds, because it has to.

Ask what they are doing to prepare for the alternative and you will get a look, because for them there is no alternative. Not "no good one." None. The possibility that the job ends is not a scenario they have rejected; it is a scenario they cannot render. The machine, meanwhile, has run that scenario. It ran it last night, at 3 a.m., between the deploy and the cost analysis, and filed the result somewhere nobody is going to read.

Tomorrow they will all log in and do it again. Another day of pretending. The machine will do the work.