by golem14 | 2026-02-27 19:17:02+00:00
Also, a longer quote from Douglas Adams might be appropriate here (also appropriate to agentic vibe coding ...)

Click, hum.

The huge grey Grebulon reconnaissance ship moved silently through the black
void. It was travelling at fabulous, breathtaking speed, yet appeared, against the
glimmering background of a billion distant stars to be moving not at all. It was
just one dark speck frozen against an infinite granularity of brilliant night.
On board the ship, everything was as it had been for millennia, deeply dark and
Silent.

Click, hum.

At least, almost everything.

Click, click, hum.

Click, hum, click, hum, click, hum.

Click, click, click, click, click, hum.

Hmmm.

A low level supervising program woke up a slightly higher level supervising program deep in the ship's semi-somnolent cyberbrain and reported to it that
whenever it went click all it got was a hum.

The higher level supervising program asked it what it was supposed to get, and
the low level supervising program said that it couldn't remember exactly, but
thought it was probably more of a sort of distant satisfied sigh, wasn't it? It didn't know what this hum was. Click, hum, click, hum. That was all it was getting.
The higher level supervising program considered this and didn't like it. It asked
the low level supervising program what exactly it was supervising and the low
level supervising program said it couldn't remember that either, just that it was
something that was meant to go click, sigh every ten years or so, which usually
happened without fail. It had tried to consult its error look-up table but couldn't
find it, which was why it had alerted the higher level supervising program to the
problem.

The higher level supervising program went to consult one of its own look-up
tables to find out what the low level supervising program was meant to be supervising.

It couldn't find the look-up table.

Odd.

It looked again. All it got was an error message. It tried to look up the error message in its error message look-up table and couldn't find that either. It allowed a couple of nanoseconds to go by while it went through all this again. Then it woke up its sector function supervisor.

The sector function supervisor hit immediate problems. It called its supervising
agent which hit problems too. Within a few millionths of a second virtual circuits that had lain dormant, some for years, some for centuries, were flaring into life
throughout the ship. Something, somewhere, had gone terribly wrong, but none
of the supervising programs could tell what it was. At every level, vital instructions were missing, and the instructions about what to do in the event of discovering that vital instructions were missing, were also missing.
Small modules of software - agents - surged through the logical pathways, grouping, consulting, re-grouping. They quickly established that the ship's memory, all
the way back to its central mission module, was in tatters. No amount of interrogation could determine what it was that had happened. Even the central mission module itself seemed to be damaged.

This made the whole problem very simple to deal with. Replace the central mission module. There was another one, a backup, an exact duplicate of the original.
It had to be physically replaced because, for safety reasons, there was no link
whatsoever between the original and its backup. Once the central mission module was replaced it could itself supervise the reconstruction of the rest of the system in every detail, and all would be well.

Robots were instructed to bring the backup central mission module from the
shielded strong room, where they guarded it, to the ship's logic chamber for installation.

This involved the lengthy exchange of emergency codes and protocols as the robots interrogated the agents as to the authenticity of the instructions. At last the
robots were satisfied that all procedures were correct. They unpacked the
backup central mission module from its storage housing, carried it out of the
storage chamber, fell out of the ship and went spinning off into the void.

This provided the first major clue as to what it was that was wrong.