The act of creation inspires a unique flavor of deep satisfaction.
In the last few weeks, I’ve been diving back into coding in my less-than-abundant free time. The mounting excitement around generative AI broke whatever capacity I had to remain on the sidelines. After dusting off my dotfiles and restoring my VSCode plugins, I quickly spun up a Next app and connected to OpenAI with langchain.
But as exciting as it was to explore AI’s capabilities in a programmatic manner, the feeling that most resonated with me was the joy of building, of taking an idea out of the ether, and making it a reality. Being a manager or executive offers plenty of opportunities to build: build a team, build a strategy, build a culture. But these somehow differ in catharsis from the sheer joy of writing and executing code that takes something from your head into material reality.
And while coding is in many ways simply “assembly”, the wiring together of a number of disparate systems and libraries to generate an output, there’s magic in it as well: the magic of that original formless idea. In his recent essay exploring AI and “magical thinking”, Avery Pennarun (aka apenwarr) highlights the unpredictable “magic” embedded in diagrammable, predictable systems. He cites Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:
The formation of hypotheses is the most mysterious of all the categories of scientific method. Where they come from, no one knows. A person is sitting somewhere, minding his own business, and suddenly—flash!—he understands something he didn’t understand before. Until it’s tested the hypothesis isn’t truth. For the tests aren’t its source. Its source is somewhere else.
Building with code feels like this hypothesis moment: there’s a flash of formless understanding, which is brought into form (and ideally usefulness) by the application of effort and skill. Coding is just the mechanism to enable building, the creation of something that lasts for some period of time, with real influence and impact on the world. As the slogan says on a t-shirt from my favorite local plant nursery: “plant for tomorrow”. (And yes, I do live in Vermont, why do you ask?). We build today, for outcomes tomorrow and the tomorrow after and the tomorrow after that.
Build Together
“Build” has particular resonance in technology circles as a result of Marc Andreesen’s early Covid call to action, “It’s Time to Build”. Andreesen tied the deficiency of America’s immediate Covid response to a broader languishing in the country’s creative output. “Building isn’t easy,” he writes, but “I think building is how we reboot the American dream”. He calls for builders to step up, and bring others along with them:
Every step of the way, to everyone around us, we should be asking the question, what are you building? What are you building directly, or helping other people to build, or teaching other people to build, or taking care of people who are building? If the work you’re doing isn’t either leading to something being built or taking care of people directly, we’ve failed you, and we need to get you into a position, an occupation, a career where you can contribute to building.
Within Andreesen’s argument is the embedded proposition that we build together, for the betterment of others.
Within the Judeo-Christian tradition, people may be familiar with famous stories of building - Noah’s arc (worked out great!) or perhaps the Tower of Babel (not so great!). There’s another topic of building that’s explored thoroughly in Judaism, and much less so in Christianity: the creation of the Mishkan, or for those who know their Bible from pop culture, Indiana Jones’ “Arc of the Covenant”. The first half of the book of Exodus presents an epic story: the enslavement of the Hebrews, the birth of Moses, Moses’s call to pharaoh to “let my people go”, the plagues, the dramatic escape through the Sea of Reeds, the revelation of the Law and the etching of the Ten Commandments in stone. All these aspects of Exodus have emerged from religion and permeated the Western cultural consciousness. But the second half of Exodus reads more like an instruction manual, as the Arc of the Covenant is first described, and then built by the master craftsman Betzalel.
Exodus describes Betzalel as endowed with “a divine spirit of skill, ability, and knowledge in every kind of craft, and inspiring him to make designs for work in gold, silver, and copper, to cut stones for setting and to carve wood—to work in every kind of designer’s craft—and to give directions” (Exodus 35:34). In The Builder as Teacher, public philosopher, rabbi, and Substacker
highlights this last characteristic of Betzalel. “If the Mishkan were just the sum total of people’s disorganized and undirected passions”, Atkins writes, “it would be a mess. Passion is no substitute for competence, either. Someone is needed to take all the positive energy and find a place for it. Betzalel has the skill of an artisan; he has technical know-how, and product vision, but his crowning virtue is the ability to route people’s strengths and passions to the right place.”Building something that truly lasts, that impacts the world and history like Betzalel’s construction of the Mishkan, requires more than craft: it requires inspiration, and even more, requires teaching. Citing the traditional sources, Atkins writes (emphasis added):
Betzalel was not just someone who knew how to make the puzzle pieces come together, but also a teacher. Betzalel took the desire to contribute and found the potential in it…. Betzalel is singled out as a teacher, according to Or HaChaim, to emphasize another virtuous quality typically lacking amongst experts—a desire to popularize and share, rather than hoard. Did Betzalel teach skills? Yes. But what was the real skill that he brought and that he taught? The skill of being human, the skill of being unique, the skill of not copying others, the skill of finding a path to self-love and to divine worship that is not written in any book.
There is virtue in the craft of building, and the output of that building. But the true virtue of building comes from the willingness to bring together and organize the collective creative impulse, to teach the skill and knowledge behind one’s craft, and to share the outcome of that craft.
Building, or Engineering?
This Substack is called “Engineering Virtues”, not “Building Virtues”. At the time I created it years ago, the title made sense, as I was an engineer. In the last few years, I’ve been working in Product, and have wondered to myself: does my own Substack still apply to me? But “engineering” is less about, well, having the title of “engineer”, and more about adopting the differentiated approach and mindset of the engineering discipline.
In Apenwarr’s essay on magical thinking and AI, he cites a deeply impactful story from his undergraduate studies in an Intro to Engineering class. His professor shared:
Engineering isn't about building a paperclip that will never break, it's about building a paperclip that will bend enough times to get the job done, at a reasonable price, in sufficient quantities, out of attainable materials, on schedule.
Engineering is knowing that no matter how hard you try, some fraction of your paperclips will snap after only one bend, and that's not your fault, that's how reality works, and it's your job to accept that and know exactly what fraction that is and design around it, because if you do engineering wrong, people are going to die. But what's worse, even if you do engineering right, sometimes people might die. As an engineer you are absolutely going to make tradeoffs in which you make things cheaper in exchange for a higher probability that people will die, because the only alternative is not making things at all.
In the real world, the failure rate is never zero, even if you do your job perfectly.
Engineering differentiates from building in its anticipation for, and appreciation of, fault tolerance. What is engineered is meant to meet the harsh conditions of the real world, and to respond to and weather those conditions. Just as Nassim Taleb differentiates between the resilient and the “antifragile”, the engineer recognizes the impossibility of building anything that will never degrade or break.
“Engineering Virtues” applies this mindset to our identities and virtuous selves. We can never be perfect. Our patience will expire, our stress will get the better of us, we will fail to live up to our own high expectations. Instead of creating some idealized version of how we show up in the world, we “engineer” ourselves with antifragility in mind. How might our very failures in following our virtues, inspire our growth to better manifest those virtues going forward? How might our virtuous selves exist outside the confines of our home or meditation hall or place of worship, and interact with the pain and messiness of the real world? How might we build with others, for others, and for the future, knowing that whatever we build will fall away and require a new generation to build on top of what’s come before?
In contemporary liberal Judaism, there’s a simple song called “Olam chesed yibaneh”. The line itself comes from the book of Psalms and means, roughly, “the world is built from loving-kindness”. In the Guide for the Perplexed, the great 12th century Jewish philosopher Maimonides cites this line as he notes “the very act of the creation is an act of God’s loving-kindness.”
Following Andreesen’s call to action, we must all ask ourselves: what are we building? Is it built from a place of loving-kindness? Is it bringing loving-kindness to the world? And if not – what’s stopping us?