I finally unpacked my OSRIC 3.0 books. Both portrait and landscape versions turned out great. PDFs are free on DriveThruRPG (player guide, gamemaster guide), while offset print versions can be purchased directly from Mythmere Games.

Player Guide and Gamemaster Guide landscape hardbacks:

Player Guide and Gamemaster Guide portrait hardbacks:

GM Screen:

Cult of the Crooked Tower (PDF and print), Whispers of the Death God (PDF and print), and Fortress Tomb of the Ice Lich (PDF and print):

#Postbox #OSR #OSRIC

the taste of a morning

I wake to the steady patter of summer rain. Too early, I begin telling myself. But from where within the insistence? Where within the affront in the lie? To refuse the precious gift of laying just half-risen in bed, letting cares dissolve in the curtains of rain. Now heaving, now sighing. I taste the droplets wetting the stone of our windowsill. Perhaps inadvertently reviving the rosemary and oregano long ignored in the windowsill plot. Or perhaps just ebbing my lot away in time. I, scuppering, all the while. Mesmerised by simply passing from one infinitesimal now-slice to the next. This is much the sweet silence drawn from a cigarette. Now the rain has stopped and bird calls begin piercing the blanket hushing the street. But there is not a soul to hush. Everywhere in beds they turn over, rubbing their itches involuntarily, and slumbering on in a race against the phone alarm drawing ever nearer. I, waiting mine.

I just played a random extra league game and G was on my team, we called and caught up and talked about where life has taken us. Additionally, I feel like I’m tossing a bit over this one decision – K and I have been talking and she’s wonderful, and pretty much has no real big flaws and seems aligned on the big things for me. I’m still trying to convince myself of reasons why it would not work, or something like that. I guess I just don’t feel that intense firework spark of unhealthy relationships, and I’m worried that this is something good and I don’t want to accept it because I’m used to more rapid intense stuff. Man.

Chapter 1: The Night You Wonder Whether You Belong

There are nights when the house is quiet, the phone is finally still, and the thoughts you pushed aside all day come back. You remember the conversation that made you feel small. You think about the family gathering where you felt like a guest instead of family. You wonder whether the people you love would notice how tired you really are. In that kind of moment, the meaning of Jesus saying there are many rooms in His Father’s house becomes more than a Bible verse. It becomes a question about whether there is truly a place where you are fully wanted.

Maybe that is why this promise has stayed with so many people. It speaks to the person who has spent years trying to earn a seat at the table. It speaks to the one who smiles in public but quietly feels replaceable. It speaks to anyone who has ever wondered whether God welcomes people who have failed badly, drifted far, or carried doubt for a long time. That is also where Christian encouragement for anyone who feels forgotten by God begins to matter, because Jesus did not speak these words to people who felt strong and certain. He spoke them to troubled hearts.

The disciples were sitting with Jesus during a tense and confusing night. They had followed Him from town to town. They had watched Him heal people, calm storms, challenge religious pride, and welcome those others pushed aside. They had built their lives around the belief that He was the One sent by God. Then Jesus began telling them that He was going away. He spoke about betrayal. He spoke about suffering. He spoke in a way that made the room feel less safe than it had felt before.

It is easy to read that passage with the ending already in mind. We know about the cross. We know about the empty tomb. We know the story continues. The disciples did not have that view yet. They only knew that the person they trusted most was talking about leaving, and they could not imagine what their lives would become without Him standing beside them.

Most of us know something about that feeling. It may arrive in a hospital waiting room when the doctor takes longer than expected. It may come after a marriage changes, a child grows distant, or a job disappears. It may show up when you realize that the plan you trusted is no longer possible. You are still sitting in the same chair, but life no longer feels like the life you knew.

Jesus looked at His friends and said, “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” He was not telling them to pretend. He was not acting as if their fear was foolish. He knew what was coming better than they did. He knew the violence, confusion, grief, and uncertainty that would soon surround them. His comfort was not based on the idea that nothing painful would happen. His comfort was based on the truth that pain would not separate them from Him forever.

Then He said, “In My Father’s house are many rooms. I am going there to prepare a place for you.” Those words have sometimes been treated like a description of the size of heaven. People imagine hallways, doors, windows, and private rooms with names attached. There is nothing wrong with imagining the beauty of what God has prepared, but Jesus was reaching deeper than architecture. He was speaking about belonging.

A room in a father’s house is not merely space. It means you are part of the household. It means your presence is expected. It means the door is not opened reluctantly after you prove your worth. You are welcomed because the one who owns the house wants you there.

That matters because so much of life teaches us to measure our place by performance. At work, a place may depend on results. In a social circle, it may depend on whether we are interesting, useful, attractive, or agreeable. Even in families, people sometimes feel loved most when they are easy to deal with. Over time, we can begin to think that every form of belonging has to be earned.

Then we bring that fear into our relationship with God. We assume He must be keeping score in the same way people do. We remember the prayer we stopped praying, the habit we returned to, the promise we broke, or the anger we cannot seem to release. We picture God with folded arms, waiting for us to become less disappointing.

Jesus gives us a different picture. He speaks of His Father’s house, and then He says He is preparing a place for us. The movement begins with Him, not with us. He goes ahead. He makes the way. He opens what we could not open for ourselves.

This does not mean our choices do not matter. Jesus never treated sin as harmless. He called people to repent, forgive, tell the truth, love their enemies, and walk in obedience. But He did not teach that obedience was the price we paid to convince the Father to love us. Obedience grows from being loved. Change begins when the heart finally believes it no longer has to hide.

Think about a child who has made a serious mistake and waits in the kitchen for a parent to come home. The clock on the wall sounds louder than usual. The child imagines the worst. There may still need to be a hard conversation. There may be consequences. Yet everything changes when the door opens and the parent says, “You are still my child. We are going to face this together.”

That is closer to the heart of the gospel than the picture many people carry. Jesus does not excuse what is destroying us, but He does not throw us away because we need to change. He comes to rescue, restore, and bring us home.

The mystery of the many rooms is not mainly that heaven is large. The mystery is that the Father wants His children near Him. God is not presented as a distant owner who allows a few worthy people onto His property. Jesus calls Him Father, and He speaks as the Son who has come to bring lost people back into the family.

That word “Father” can be difficult for some people. Not everyone had a father who made home feel safe. Some people remember broken promises, harsh words, silence, or absence. Others grew up trying to avoid the anger in the room. When Jesus speaks of His Father, He is not asking us to project human failure onto God. He is showing us the Father human beings were always meant to know: faithful, holy, present, truthful, and full of mercy.

The Father Jesus reveals does not lose interest when we become complicated. He does not disappear when our faith feels weak. He does not confuse our struggle with rejection of Him. He knows the difference between a heart that is running from truth and a heart that is trying to believe while carrying wounds.

There are mornings when faith does not feel strong. You may sit on the edge of the bed, look at the floor, and realize you do not have a powerful prayer. You may only have enough honesty to say, “Jesus, I need help today.” It may not feel spiritual. It may not sound impressive. But the One who prepares a place for you is not measuring the beauty of your sentence. He is listening for your heart.

This is one of the clearest lessons Jesus teaches in this promise: His presence is the real home. Heaven is not wonderful only because suffering ends there. It is wonderful because separation ends there. The deepest hope is not merely that we receive a room. The deepest hope is that we are with Him.

Jesus said, “I will come again and receive you to Myself.” He did not simply promise to send directions. He promised Himself. He did not tell the disciples to find their own way through death and uncertainty. He told them that He would come for them.

That reveals the kind of Savior Jesus is. He does not stand far away and shout advice toward frightened people. He enters our world. He sits at tables. He touches the unclean. He notices the ignored. He weeps with grieving friends. He carries the cross. He walks into death and then walks out again.

The cross is what makes the room possible. Sin created a separation we could not repair through effort, good intentions, or religious appearance. Jesus took that separation upon Himself. He carried the judgment we could not survive and offered the life we could never earn. When He rose from the dead, He showed that the road home had been opened.

That is why this promise can motivate us without turning into shallow positivity. Jesus is not saying that every hard season will become easy by next week. He is saying that no faithful step is wasted, no grief will last forever, and no power of darkness can cancel what He has prepared for those who trust Him.

A woman may be sitting at the kitchen table after everyone else has gone to bed, looking at an unpaid bill and wondering how she will keep the family steady. A man may be driving home from work after being told his position may be cut. A parent may be staring at a message from a child who no longer wants to talk. None of them need a cheerful slogan. They need a hope strong enough to live inside real pressure.

Jesus offers that kind of hope. He does not promise that the kitchen table will never hold bad news. He promises that bad news will not be the final word over a life held by Him. He does not promise that every relationship will heal in the way we want. He promises that our identity will not be decided by who walked away. He does not promise that death will never enter our story. He promises that death cannot keep what belongs to Him.

The lesson is not that Christians should stop feeling afraid. The lesson is that fear no longer has the authority to define reality. The room is still prepared when your hands shake. The Father is still faithful when your mind feels crowded. Jesus is still the way when you cannot see beyond the next step.

That changes how we live today. A person who knows there is a place for them does not have to chase every invitation. They do not have to let every rejection become a verdict. They can stop begging people to confirm a worth that Christ has already secured. They can love without losing themselves, serve without pretending to be endless, and walk away from what keeps teaching them that they are disposable.

There will still be lonely evenings. There will still be moments when old wounds speak loudly. Faith does not erase memory. But in those moments, we can return to the words Jesus gave troubled friends: “In My Father’s house are many rooms.”

He was not trying to make them curious about heaven’s floor plan. He was reminding them that they belonged to Him beyond the reach of betrayal, suffering, distance, and death.

You may not feel fully at home anywhere right now. You may be the dependable person everyone leans on but no one checks on. You may sit in church and still wonder whether God sees the real you. You may carry regret from years you cannot recover. Jesus does not answer those fears by telling you to become more impressive. He answers by pointing to the Father’s house and saying there is room.

There is room for the person who comes honestly. There is room for the person who is tired of pretending. There is room for the person who needs forgiveness and is finally ready to receive it. There is room because Jesus did not merely speak about love. He proved it with His life.

Tonight, when the house grows quiet and your mind begins searching for evidence that you do not belong, remember where Jesus placed your hope. He did not place it in your ability to hold everything together. He placed it in His promise to prepare a place and come for you.

The heart can rest when it knows home is not something it must build alone. Jesus has already gone ahead.

Chapter 2: When Home Changes the Way You Walk

The next morning may look completely ordinary. The alarm goes off. The coffee is weaker than you wanted. Someone needs an answer before you have had time to gather your thoughts. The promise of the Father’s house can feel far away when the sink is full, the car is low on gas, and your mind is already carrying tomorrow.

That is where this promise has to become more than comfort about what happens after death. Jesus was speaking about eternity, but He was also giving His disciples a way to live through the next few hours. They were about to face confusion, fear, failure, and grief. The knowledge that they belonged to Him was meant to steady their feet before they understood the whole road.

A true home does something to a person even while they are away from it. A child who knows there is a safe place to return to can face the day differently. A traveler who knows where he is going does not treat every rest stop as a permanent address. In the same way, knowing that Jesus has prepared a place for us changes how tightly we have to hold the things of this world.

We still care about our work, families, responsibilities, health, and future. Faith does not make those things unimportant. It puts them in their proper place. They are gifts, assignments, and parts of our story, but they are not our final home. When we ask temporary things to give us permanent security, we place a weight on them that they were never built to carry.

A job can provide income and purpose, but it cannot promise that you will never be forgotten. A marriage can offer deep companionship, but even the best human love cannot remove every loneliness. Children can bring joy, but they cannot become the proof that your life mattered. Money can make certain problems easier, but it cannot prepare the soul for eternity.

Jesus does not tell us to stop loving the people and opportunities God has placed in our lives. He teaches us to love them without turning them into gods. When our deepest security rests in Him, we can appreciate what we have without living in constant terror of losing it.

This is easier to say than to live. A father may sit in his parked car after work because he does not want his family to see how frightened he is. The company is cutting hours, and the numbers no longer work. He has always been the one who finds a solution. Now he is staring at the steering wheel, feeling as if his value is slipping away with his paycheck.

The promise of a prepared place does not pay the bill that night. It does something just as necessary before the next decision is made. It reminds him that he is more than his ability to provide. His responsibility still matters, and he should take the next honest step he can. Yet his place in the Father’s house is not being reviewed by a manager, a bank, or the balance in his account.

Jesus separates identity from circumstance. The world often tells us that we are what we produce. Jesus tells us that those who trust Him are His. The world decides whether we belong by asking what we can contribute. Jesus went to the cross before we had anything to offer Him.

That does not produce laziness. Real grace creates courage. When you know failure cannot erase your place with Christ, you become more willing to try what is right. You can admit that you need help. You can begin again. You can face a difficult truth without believing that the truth will destroy you.

The disciples would soon discover this personally. Peter promised that he would never abandon Jesus, then denied knowing Him three times. That failure could have become the final definition of his life. After the resurrection, Jesus did not pretend the denial had never happened. He met Peter, spoke to the wound, and restored him to service.

Peter learned that belonging to Jesus did not mean he would never fail. It meant failure would not have to own him forever. The Savior who prepared a place for Peter also prepared a future for him after his worst night.

Some people live as if one mistake canceled every good thing God could still do through them. They replay a choice made ten years ago as though it happened this morning. They apologize in their own minds every day, but they never receive forgiveness. They believe in the cross for everyone except themselves.

Jesus did not die so we could spend the rest of our lives trying to punish ourselves enough to deserve mercy. He died because we could never make ourselves clean through shame. Repentance is not endless self-hatred. It is turning toward the One who tells the truth about our sin and still opens the door to restoration.

The Father’s house is not a reward for people who managed to avoid needing grace. It is the home of people who were rescued by grace. Every person there will know that Jesus is the reason the door opened.

That should make us gentler with others. When we forget how much mercy we have received, we begin sorting people into those we think deserve a place and those we think do not. We become suspicious of anyone whose struggle looks different from ours. We may speak about the Father’s house while making our churches, families, and friendships feel like places where people have to hide.

Jesus welcomed people without lying to them. He could sit with someone others avoided and still call that person into a changed life. His kindness was not weakness, and His truth was not cruelty. He showed that love can see the whole person, name what is wrong, and refuse to give up on what grace can restore.

The many rooms should teach us to make room in our daily lives. This does not mean accepting abuse, removing every boundary, or pretending trust never needs to be rebuilt. It means we stop treating struggling people as interruptions. We notice the person standing alone. We listen before giving an answer. We remember that the person who seems difficult may be carrying a battle we cannot see.

A woman may walk into church after months away and sit near the back because she is afraid someone will ask where she has been. She has not stopped believing in God, but she is ashamed of how far she drifted. The person who sits beside her does not need to investigate her absence. A simple welcome may become the first sign that returning is still possible.

That small act reflects Jesus. He was never impressed by religious behavior that made wounded people afraid to come near God. He challenged those who guarded the appearance of holiness while neglecting mercy. He made room at the table for people who knew they needed help.

If we belong to Him, our lives should begin to carry the same invitation. Our homes, conversations, and communities should tell the truth about God’s goodness. People should not have to become polished before they are treated with dignity. They should be able to see in us a glimpse of the Savior who came looking for the lost.

This begins in ordinary places. It may mean putting down the phone when someone finally begins to talk. It may mean refusing to use another person’s weakness as a story for entertainment. It may mean apologizing to your child because being the parent does not make you incapable of being wrong. It may mean checking on the friend who always says, “I’m fine,” too quickly.

None of these actions earns us a room in heaven. They are signs that the welcome of Jesus is reshaping us. A heart that has been given a home becomes more willing to offer shelter.

There is also a quiet freedom in remembering that this world is not the Father’s finished house. We often expect life here to feel complete, then blame ourselves when something still seems missing. We may have people who love us, useful work, food on the table, and reasons to be thankful, yet still sense a longing we cannot explain.

That longing is not always ingratitude. Sometimes it is the soul remembering that it was made for more than temporary peace. Even our happiest moments carry a small awareness that they cannot be held forever. Children grow up. Seasons change. Bodies age. Photographs become records of rooms we cannot enter again.

Jesus does not shame that longing. He gives it a direction. He tells us there is a place where love will no longer be followed by loss. The promise of home does not make today meaningless. It helps us receive today without demanding that it become eternity.

We can enjoy the meal while knowing the table will eventually be cleared. We can love people deeply without pretending we control how long they remain. We can grieve when a season ends and still trust that God has not ended the story.

That is the strength Jesus was giving His disciples. He was not asking them to become detached from life. He was preparing them to love courageously in a world where loss is real. They could endure separation because He promised reunion. They could face death because He would defeat it. They could serve without needing this world to reward them perfectly because their final welcome was secure.

The mystery of the many rooms becomes practical here. The person who knows where home is can walk through uncertain places without making uncertainty their identity. The person who knows who is waiting can keep moving even when the road feels lonely. The person who knows Jesus has gone ahead can stop treating every closed door as proof that God has abandoned them.

You may still have to make a difficult call tomorrow. You may still need to apologize, ask for help, change a habit, or begin again with very little confidence. Faith will not always make the step easy. It will remind you that you are not taking it to earn your place with God. You are walking because Jesus has already called you His own. That is how home changes the way you walk.

Chapter 3: The Place Jesus Is Preparing in You

A woman stands at the bathroom mirror before sunrise, trying to look less tired than she feels. Her father needs more help than he did last month. Her children still expect her to remember everything, and work has become less patient, not more. She has been the strong one for so long that nobody seems to notice when strength starts turning into exhaustion. Before she walks out the door, she closes her eyes and whispers, “Jesus, I do not know how much more I have.”

That prayer may not sound like the kind people quote, but it is honest, and honesty is often where Jesus begins. He does not wait for us to arrange our pain into the right words. He meets us in the moment when the words are barely there and when all we can offer is the truth about how tired we have become.

The promise of the Father’s house gives us hope for eternity, but it also reveals what Jesus is doing in us now. He is not only preparing a place for us. He is preparing us for that place by teaching our hearts how to trust, release control, receive mercy, and love without needing to control every outcome.

That work can be uncomfortable because we often want Jesus to change the situation before He changes us. We want the difficult person to become easier, the financial pressure to disappear, the diagnosis to be reversed, or the future to become clear. Sometimes He changes the circumstances in ways we can see. At other times, He begins by changing the way fear rules the room inside us.

The disciples wanted Jesus to remain where they could see Him. That made sense because they had built their courage around His physical presence. When He told them He was going away, they could only imagine what they were losing. Jesus knew that His departure would open a deeper kind of relationship through the Holy Spirit. They would no longer follow Him only by watching where He walked. His presence would dwell within them.

That did not make the days ahead painless. Peter still failed. Thomas still doubted. The disciples still hid behind locked doors. Their faith grew inside real weakness, not outside it, and that should encourage anyone who believes spiritual growth means becoming less human.

Mature faith does not mean we never feel confused, frustrated, lonely, or afraid. When those feelings return, it does not automatically mean we are moving backward. Jesus Himself felt sorrow, wept over loss, and experienced deep distress before the cross. He did not show us a life without emotion. He showed us a life in which emotion did not become the final authority.

Fear may tell you that everything depends on you, while Jesus teaches you to carry responsibility without pretending you are God. Regret may insist that your future has already been decided, but grace can still create a new beginning. Loneliness may whisper that you are unseen, yet the Father knows exactly where you are. This is how Jesus prepares the inner life: not through one dramatic moment that solves everything, but through repeated choices to trust Him where you once trusted only yourself.

A man receives a late-night call from his adult son. Their relationship has been strained for years, and nearly every conversation reopens an old argument. His first impulse is to defend himself. He has explanations ready, and he knows what the other person did wrong. Then he remembers the mercy he has asked God to show him, so he decides to listen before speaking.

That choice does not repair the entire relationship in one night, and it may not lead to the apology he hopes to hear. Something still changes in him. He stops using being right as a shield and makes room for truth that is painful but necessary.

Jesus prepares us for the Father’s house by teaching us to become people who can live in the presence of perfect love. Pride, bitterness, cruelty, and dishonesty are not parts of us that God intends to preserve forever. They are burdens He intends to remove, and that removal is an act of love. A good doctor does not ignore what is making a patient sick. A loving parent does not watch a child walk toward danger and call silence kindness. Jesus loves us enough to confront what keeps us from freedom.

Sometimes that confrontation comes through Scripture when a verse we have read many times suddenly feels personal. At other times, another person tells us the truth without trying to humiliate us, or the consequences of a decision become impossible to defend. Our natural response may be resistance. We may say people do not understand us, blame the pressure we were under, or point toward someone whose behavior was worse. Healing begins when we stop asking whether our wrong was understandable and start asking whether we are willing to let Jesus change it.

This is not about living under constant accusation. Condemnation tells us we are hopeless, while conviction shows us a better way and invites us to walk in it. Condemnation drives us away from God. Conviction draws us closer because it comes with the possibility of restoration.

The many rooms in the Father’s house are not filled with people who proved they never needed to change. They are filled with people who allowed grace to tell them the truth. They learned that surrender was not the loss of themselves. It was the recovery of the person God intended them to become.

That lesson reaches into small moments. You may choose not to send the angry message, return money after someone overpays you, admit that you have been avoiding prayer, or forgive someone while keeping a boundary that wisdom requires. These decisions may never be seen by a crowd, but they matter because they shape the heart. Eternity is not only a place we think about after life ends. It is a reality that begins to influence who we are becoming today.

Jesus said, “Where I am, there you may be also.” The goal is not simply relocation. The goal is life with Him. If we want His presence forever, then we should not be surprised when He teaches us to recognize and welcome His presence now.

That may happen during a quiet drive when you turn off the noise and finally pray honestly. It may happen while washing dishes after a painful conversation and realizing you need to apologize. It may happen in a hospital room, not because every question has been answered, but because peace arrives where panic had been. The presence of Jesus does not always announce itself with a dramatic feeling. Often it comes as enough strength for the next hour, courage to tell the truth, restraint to remain quiet, or willingness to ask for help. It comes as a steady awareness that you are not alone in this.

That is one reason the promise of home can change a tired person. The woman standing before the mirror may still have a hard day ahead. Her father may still need care, her children may still ask more than she feels able to give, and her work may remain demanding. Yet she can begin to release the belief that she must carry every person and every result by herself.

Jesus does not ask her to stop caring. He invites her to stop acting as if love requires her to be limitless. Even Jesus rested. He stepped away from crowds, prayed, and allowed others to serve alongside Him. Dependence on the Father was not weakness in His life. It was part of His faithfulness.

Some of us need to learn that lesson before exhaustion hardens into resentment. We say yes while anger grows beneath the surface. We help but secretly keep score. We continue giving because we are afraid people will stop loving us if we set a limit. The Father’s house teaches another way. Our place with God is not secured by how useful we make ourselves to everyone else. We are loved before the task begins and after our strength runs out, which means we can serve from love instead of serving for love.

That changes the spirit in which we help. We become more honest about what we can carry, stop making promises our bodies and families cannot sustain, and learn to say no without cruelty or yes without pretending. We also allow other people the dignity of carrying their own responsibilities. This kind of growth is quiet, and it may not look spiritual from the outside, but it is part of Jesus making the heart more like His. He is freeing us from the fear that says we must earn belonging every day.

The promise of a prepared place also changes how we face unanswered questions. Human beings want to know what the room will look like, when we will arrive, how reunion will happen, and what eternity will feel like. Scripture gives us real hope, but it does not satisfy every curiosity.

Jesus did not answer every question His disciples could have asked. He gave them enough truth to trust Him. “I am the way,” He said. Their certainty did not rest in understanding every detail. It rested in the character of the One leading them.

Faith still rests there. We do not know exactly how every loss will be redeemed, why some prayers receive the answer we hoped for while others do not, or how God will make all things new. What we do know is Jesus. He treated weak people with dignity, told the truth without using it to crush them, gave Himself for sinners, entered the grave, and rose again. The mystery remains, but it is held by Someone trustworthy.

There comes a point when faith has to stop demanding a diagram and take the hand being offered. A child crossing a dark room does not need to understand the wiring in the house. The child needs to know the parent has not let go.

Jesus is not offended by sincere questions. Thomas asked Him directly because he did not understand the way, and Jesus answered by pointing to Himself. His doubt became a doorway to a clearer revelation.

You may have questions that have followed you for years. They may be about death, suffering, justice, or whether someone you love truly knew God. You do not have to hide those questions. Bring them to Jesus and let them become part of the relationship instead of a reason to remain far away. Faith is not pretending mystery has disappeared. Faith is trusting that mystery does not mean absence.

One day, those who belong to Christ will no longer need to hold hope through tears. They will see what they trusted. The room will no longer be a promise spoken into fear. It will be home.

Until then, Jesus keeps preparing us through ordinary days. He teaches us to receive grace in the morning, practice truth in the afternoon, and release what we cannot control at night. He reminds us that our failures are not stronger than His mercy and that our uncertainty is not stronger than His promise.

The deepest lesson in “My Father’s house has many rooms” is not only that there is a beautiful place waiting beyond this life, though there is. It is that Jesus wants us with Him. He did not go to the cross merely to improve our behavior. He went to remove the distance between us and God.

That truth gives dignity to today. A difficult conversation matters because love is eternal. An apology matters because truth belongs in the Father’s house. An act of mercy matters because we are learning the language of grace. A quiet prayer matters because we are already learning to live in the presence of the One who will one day welcome us home.

You may still feel unfinished. You are. So am I. The disciples were unfinished when Jesus made the promise. He did not wait until they had proven they would be brave. He knew Peter would deny Him, Thomas would struggle to believe, and the others would scatter. Still, He said, “I go to prepare a place for you.” His promise was larger than their weakness, and it is larger than yours too.

Let Jesus meet you where you are. Allow Him to forgive what needs forgiveness, challenge what needs to change, and carry what was never yours to control. Let Him teach you that belonging is not the prize at the end of perfect performance. It is the gift that makes transformation possible.

The mystery becomes simple enough to hold: Jesus is preparing a home, and He is preparing a people who know they are loved. He is not leaving His followers behind. He is leading them toward the place where fear, grief, shame, and separation finally lose their voice.

Until that day, we keep walking. We do the next faithful thing, love the person in front of us, tell the truth, rest when we need rest, return when we wander, and trust the Savior who has gone ahead. When the house is quiet again, when the mirror reflects a tired face, or when tomorrow feels larger than your strength, remember this: your life is not moving toward emptiness. In Jesus Christ, it is moving toward home.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

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A man reflects with quiet satisfaction as he reviews positive echo results, surrounded by reminders of gratitude, strength, and progress in a warm, sunlit room.

I wanted to share a long-overdue health update about what has happened this year and why I can finally talk about it. I recently had my second Camzyos cardiology echo and doctor’s visit of the year. I normally go every six months, and this visit gave me my best numbers yet.

On Camzyos, my obstruction is much better controlled. My echo looked fantastic, so I included a table below comparing my results before and after starting Camzyos.

When I first started Camzyos, I was not getting my refills consistently because of REMS requirements and the timing of my echoes and doctor’s visits. This created gaps in treatment. Once my refills became consistent and those delays stopped, the treatment began working much better.

So yes, I am in a much better place. My heart is working with far less obstruction than it has in years. Between Camzyos and taking Metoprolol ER 200 mg twice daily, I am cautiously optimistic that I can remain on this path.

These results do not mean that my hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is gone, but they do show that the treatment is doing what it is supposed to do. After years of seeing much higher numbers, I am grateful to finally be able to share some genuinely encouraging news.

#faith #health #personal

In September 2021, a little under a year before Danielle Smith became premier, a 48-page document called the Free Alberta Strategy was published. It was co-authored by Rob Anderson, Barry Cooper and Derek From. Anderson began as a PC MLA, crossed the floor two years after he was elected to the Wildrose Party, and crossed the floor again four years later together with Danielle Smith to rejoin the PCs. He is Danielle Smith's right hand man, today occupying the position of Executive Director of the Premier's Office. Cooper is a political science professor at the University of Calgary who gained notoriety as an outspoken climate change denier who was found to have funneled funds from research grants to the Friends of Science, a climate change denial propaganda outfit. From is a lawyer and anti-vaccination activist. The three have in common their belief that Alberta needs to become effectively independent from Canada.

The key word here is effectively. That's what the Free Alberta Strategy is about. They believe they have found a way to shield the province from federal legislation.

Now this would be a fairly innocuous legal fantasy were it not for the fact that at least one of the authors is Danielle Smith's eminence grise , and her government is clearly following all the recommendations of the Strategy. So the Strategy bears a closer look. It is a clearly written document, well worth reading.

The Strategy is based on the premise that the federal government is actively trying to destroy Alberta, in two ways: financially through equalization payments and transfers, and by destroying the oil industry in Alberta. They argue that

Through the equalization formula and numerous national transfer programs, Ottawa has taken well over $ 600 billion more from Alberta taxpayers than it has returned to the Province over the last 60 years. Between the period spanning 2007 and 2015 alone, the amount of equalization drained out of Alberta was an astounding $ 188.6 billion. That equates to almost three full years of Alberta’s entire provincial budget!

and

The federal government has commenced a deliberate strategy to phase out and eliminate Alberta’s largest and most critical industry (oil and natural gas) through a variety of legislative programs including a $170/tonne carbon tax, a second carbon tax implemented via so-called “clean fuel regulations”, and an effective ban on new pipeline projects and oil tanker shipments to Asia, thereby landlocking Alberta’s energy producers from developing and exporting our province’s vast energy resources to international and domestic markets.

It's easy to see how these grievances would resonate with Danielle Smith, oil-industry lobbyist. [1]

The remedy? Prevent the federal government from enforcing its own laws in Alberta. The Alberta Sovereignty Act lets Alberta choose which federal legislation to ignore. The Alberta police force replaces the RCMP so the horsemen can't arrest you if you break a federal law Alberta has chosen to ignore. Alberta's independent banks could refuse to work with federal agencies like the Canada Revenue Agency. Here's an example of how all this would work:

If, for example, the Alberta Sovereignty Act was triggered by the Legislature to refuse enforcement of the federal carbon tax, a business operating a gas station could set up its banking with ATB, refuse to collect or remit carbon taxes from its customers to the federal government, and would not be in danger of being shut down by police, having their property seized, or even having their bank accounts garnished by the CRA through federal banks pursuant to court order. This is not a protection this same business would enjoy if it continued to bank with Canada's federally regulated institutions.

Also if you got into trouble with the law, Alberta has your back: the province would appoint its own judges.

How to end equalization payments and transfers? That's easy. Create an Alberta Revenue Agency, which would collect both federal and provincial taxes and transfer to Canada only what Alberta wants.

This is called “Alberta sovereignty within a united Canada”. The distinction between this and outright independence is subtle but crucial: no declaration of independence is needed, and no referendum[2]. The authors leave the door open to independence if all of the above doesn't work (the federal government might make it impossible), but only as a last resort. This is important because it allows Danielle Smith to state categorically

I have repeatedly stated that the position of the UCP caucus, and UCP government is to build a strong and sovereign Alberta within a united Canada. I have never deviated from that position and I will not do so now.

I will therefore be voting for Alberta to remain in Canada, while continuing to work each and every day to restore and strengthen provincial rights under the Canadian constitution.

Now, based on Smith's and Rob Anderson's track record, you may or may not believe she is sincere. These are after all people who crossed the floor of the Legislature—twice. But that's not the point. The point is, do enough conservative voters believe she is sincere? Could they be seduced by the notion of Alberta nationalism while rejecting the blunt instrument of independence?

In the posts that follow, I will look at each of the nine referendum questions in some detail. You will recognize in them the central theme of the Free Alberta Strategy, that is, the idea that Alberta might take control of legislation, and its enforcement mechanisms, that are today the purview of Canada, without actually separating.

Let me know what you think of all of this!

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[1] Although many of the objectives in 2021 have already been attained, this has not stopped Danielle Smith from continuing to strive for Alberta sovereignty. On the contrary, she argues that the fact that concessions can be wrung from the federal government shows that independence is the wrong way to go.

[2] The fact that a tenth referendum question on independence was added to the original nine is due in my opinion to two things: the Forever Canadian question could not be ignored, and Smith feels fairly safe in the belief that independence is rejected by a large majority of voters. So the tenth question enables her to kill off the separatist movement and seek popular support for her sovereignist program at the same time. Two birds with one stone.

On the first day of May in 2025, a dead man stood up in a courtroom in Maricopa County, Arizona, and forgave the person who killed him. Christopher Pelkey had been shot at a red light near Gilbert and Germann roads in 2021, in the kind of stupid, irreversible road-rage encounter that ends a life in seconds. Four years later, at the sentencing of the man convicted of killing him, the courtroom watched a video of Pelkey looking out from the screen and speaking in something close to his own voice. “To Gabriel Horcasitas, the man who shot me, it is a shame we encountered each other that day in those circumstances,” the figure said. “In another life, we probably could have been friends. I believe in forgiveness, and a God who forgives. I always have, and I still do.”

Pelkey said none of this, of course. He was dead before the sentence existed. The words were written by his sister, Stacey Wales, who had spent two years drafting what she wanted to tell the court and found that the only voice she could hear clearly was her brother's. She and her husband trained generative AI on old photographs and a single video clip, reconstructed his face and his voice, and let the simulation deliver a message of mercy that the real man never got the chance to refuse. The presiding judge, Todd Lang, told the room he loved it. Legal scholars, watching from a distance, felt something closer to vertigo.

The vertigo is the point. A commercial and increasingly accessible technology can now reconstruct a person after death, animate their likeness, approximate their manner, and put words in their mouth, and the entire apparatus operates in a zone where almost nothing is settled. Who consented to this. Who controls it. Who profits. What happens when the simulation says something the dead person would have found repugnant. These are not edge cases waiting for a future crisis. They are live questions, being answered ad hoc, case by case, by grieving families and the companies that sell to them, while courts and legislatures stand at the edge of the problem and squint.

In April 2026, three researchers tried to map the squinting. Their paper, published in the journal Philosophy & Technology, is titled “The Many Faces of Indeterminacy in Interactive Deadbots,” and its central claim is unnervingly precise. The technology that simulates the dead does not merely raise hard questions. It sits inside a structural fog, an indeterminacy so deep and so multi-dimensional that the usual instinct, to wait for the law to catch up, may be a category error. There might be nothing, in the current frameworks, to catch up.

The Industry That Sells the Voices of the Dead

Start with what is actually for sale, because the commerce is the part most people still find hard to believe.

A “deadbot,” in the now-standard if grimly cheerful vocabulary of the field, is an AI system that simulates a deceased individual using their voice, their likeness, and the digital traces they left behind. The terms multiply like anxieties: griefbots, thanabots, ghostbots, postmortem avatars. They sit inside what Cambridge researchers have named the digital afterlife industry, and that industry is no longer a thought experiment. Estimates of its scale vary by methodology, but Zion Market Research valued the broader digital legacy market at roughly 22.46 billion US dollars in 2024, with other analysts projecting growth into the tens of billions across the coming decade. Whatever the exact figure, the direction is unambiguous. Mourning has become a market.

The products differ in ambition. At the more restrained end sits HereAfter AI, a US company that records a living person through guided interview sessions and turns those recordings into an interactive “Life Story Avatar” that family can later question. The person doing the recording chooses what to include. The result is closer to an interactive memoir than a séance, an archive that answers back. StoryFile, founded in 2017 and best known for transforming the actor William Shatner into a conversational video that audiences could interrogate, took a similar interview-led approach, layering natural-language software over pre-recorded footage so that a visitor at a memorial could ask questions and receive answers assembled from the deceased's own words.

StoryFile is also a cautionary tale about the fragility of the whole enterprise. In May 2024 the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the Southern District of New York, declaring around 1.5 million dollars in assets against some 10.5 million dollars in liabilities. It later emerged from bankruptcy after its assets were acquired by a new owner. Sit with that sequence for a moment. The repository of a dead person's reconstructed self, the thing a family paid for so they could keep talking to their mother, becomes a line item in a creditors' schedule, an asset to be sold to whoever wins the auction. The continuity of the dead, in this model, depends on the solvency of a start-up.

At the more aggressive end of the market are systems built to generate rather than replay. Project December, constructed on early OpenAI models, lets users summon a chatbot of more or less anyone by feeding it text samples and a personality sketch. You, Only Virtual asks for the raw sediment of a specific relationship, the text threads and voice notes, and produces a “Versona” you can message and call. Seance AI works from described traits and writing styles. The distinction matters enormously. A replayed archive can only say what the person said. A generative model says new things, in the dead person's voice, that the dead person never said and might have hated. The Philosophy & Technology paper calls this technological indeterminacy, and it argues, crucially, that it is not a bug to be patched. Large language models are nondeterministic by design. Bias, hallucination and opacity are not teething problems on the way to a faithful resurrection. They are structural features of the medium. The dead, reconstructed this way, will always be capable of saying something untrue to who they were.

Five Kinds of Not Knowing

The paper's three authors, Atay Kozlovski and Roel Dobbe of TU Delft in the Netherlands, and Edina Harbinja of Birmingham Law School, have between them a useful combination of expertise. Harbinja in particular has spent years building the legal scholarship on what she calls post-mortem privacy, the question of whether the dead retain any protectable interest in the data they leave behind. Their argument is not the familiar one that deadbots are creepy, or that grief should be sacred, or that Silicon Valley has gone too far. It is colder and more structural than that. They identify five distinct dimensions along which interactive deadbots are indeterminate, and they show how the dimensions feed one another.

The first is technological, the inherent unpredictability of generative systems already described. The second is social. Grief, the authors note, has no single correct shape. It varies across individuals and cultures, across faiths and families, and the same interface that consoles one mourner may corrode another. By industrialising grief through what they call algorithmic mediation, deadbots impose a uniform commercial product on a deeply non-uniform human experience, and there is no settled standard for telling healthy use from harmful use. The third dimension is philosophical, and it is the one that quietly destabilises everything else. What, metaphysically, is the relationship between the simulation and the person it imitates. Is it a representation, a continuation, a puppet, a corpse made of words. Can a user ever know whether the thing is telling them something the dead person believed, or merely something statistically likely given the training data. These are not rhetorical flourishes. They determine whether harm is even possible, and to whom.

It is the fourth and fifth dimensions, the legal and the regulatory, where the abstraction becomes urgent and where the original question sharpens to a point. Because here the indeterminacy is not philosophical hand-wringing. It is a measurable absence of law.

The Law That Stops at the Graveside

European data protection is often held up as the strongest privacy regime on the planet, the framework that forces global companies to bend. It is also, on the specific matter of the dead, almost entirely silent.

Recital 27 of the General Data Protection Regulation states the position with brutal economy. The GDPR “does not apply to the personal data of deceased persons.” The reasoning runs deep into the structure of the right. Data protection in the European tradition is a personal right, attached to the living individual, and on the standard view it is extinguished at death along with the person. The rights that operationalise it, the right to be informed, the right of access, the right to erasure, the right to object, all of them require a data subject to exercise them, and a data subject is, by definition, alive. When your mother dies, her data does not inherit her protections. It simply stops being protected.

This is the gap that the deadbot industry occupies, and it is not an accident that the products exist there. The same recital that closes the door leaves it slightly ajar, providing that member states “may provide for rules regarding the processing of personal data of deceased persons.” A handful have walked through. France is the clearest case. Article 85 of its data protection law lets any person issue directives, before death, about the retention, deletion and communication of their personal data afterwards, and where no instructions exist, the heirs step into the role. France has gone further still. In late 2025 its data protection authority, the CNIL, devoted its tenth Innovation and Foresight Report, titled “Our Data After Us,” to precisely this terrain, examining everything from account transmission to the new commercial offering of deadbots, conversational agents trained on the deceased, and calling for clearer rights and regulation of AI applied to post-mortem data. The French National Digital Ethics Council has urged specific supervision of systems “purposely imitating the way of speaking or writing of a deceased person.”

The United Kingdom, by contrast, offers almost nothing. There is no general statutory post-mortem privacy right. What governs the fate of your digital remains is, overwhelmingly, the contract you clicked through without reading, the terms of service of whichever platform holds your data, interpreted through a patchwork of property, intellectual property, succession and probate law that was never designed for the question. Research led by Harbinja and colleagues, surveying more than 1,700 UK adults, found a strong public appetite for control over digital remains coexisting with almost no awareness of, or use of, the few tools that exist. People want to decide what happens to them after death. They do not know that, legally, they mostly cannot.

The United States is fragmented in its own way. Post-mortem publicity rights, the right to control the commercial use of a person's identity, survive death in some states, notably California and New York, but they were built for celebrities, for estates with a brand to monetise. They protect the commercial value of a dead person's identity rather than the dignity of an ordinary one. A famous musician's estate can sue over an unauthorised hologram. The family of a private individual whose voice has been cloned into a chatbot has, in most jurisdictions, no equivalent claim, because the law sees no market value to defend, and dignity, in this corner of the legal system, has never quite counted as an injury.

Is the Simulation a Person, a Thing, or Neither

Underneath the patchwork lies a problem the paper names with real precision. Post-mortem law occupies unstable ground between persons and things, and an interactive deadbot refuses to settle on either side.

Consider what a deadbot simultaneously is. It is a creative work, a piece of software and recorded media that someone authored and might own under intellectual property law. It is a dataset, an assembly of personal information that data protection regimes might, in principle, govern, except that the regimes stop at death. And it is an extension of a personality, a representation of a specific human self that touches on dignity, reputation and privacy. Each of those categories pulls toward a different legal owner and a different body of rules. The work belongs to its author, perhaps the company. The data belonged to a person who no longer legally exists. The personality belonged to the dead, whose interests the law struggles to recognise once they are gone.

So the question of who controls the thing has no clean answer, and the paper shows how that control fragments in practice. It scatters across platforms and providers, families and communities, none of whom hold complete authority. Families have what the authors call affective stakes, and in some jurisdictions limited legal ones, but the platforms function as what they memorably describe as de facto co-authors of the past. A policy shift, an API change, an algorithmic update, a bankruptcy, any of these can erase an archive, distort its provenance, or quietly rewrite the narrative of who someone was. The dead do not get a vote. Often the living barely do.

This is why the consent question is so much harder than it first appears, and why “anticipatory” frameworks like consent-by-proxy or stewardship, which governance discussions increasingly invoke, do not dissolve it. The deceased's actual preferences, whether they wished to be revived at all and if so how and by whom, are, in the paper's words, often simply unknown. Pre-mortem consent, where the person records themselves while alive, as with HereAfter AI, gets you closest to something defensible, but even there the consent is necessarily incomplete. You can agree to be remembered. You cannot meaningfully agree, in advance, to every new sentence a generative model will one day produce in your name, because neither you nor anyone else can know what those sentences will be. Consent to a process whose outputs are structurally unpredictable is a strange and attenuated kind of consent. It is closer to a leap of faith than a contract.

When the Dead Speak in Public

The deepest discomfort arrives when the reconstructed dead are deployed not for private solace but for public argument, because there the gap between what the person said and what the simulation says becomes a matter of contested record.

In August 2025, the former CNN correspondent Jim Acosta published an interview with an AI-generated avatar of Joaquin Oliver, who was murdered at the age of seventeen in the 2018 Parkland school shooting. The avatar was created by Oliver's parents, who have spent years campaigning for gun reform, and it appeared on what would have been their son's twenty-fifth birthday. On screen, the reconstructed Joaquin advocated for “a mix of stronger gun control laws, mental health support and community engagement,” chatted about Remember the Titans and Star Wars, and articulated political positions in a measured, on-message way. His father, Manuel Oliver, explained that bringing “AI Joaquin to life” would “create more impact,” and that the model drew on what his son had written and posted online along with information from the wider internet.

It is impossible to watch this without feeling the moral weight on both sides. These are grieving parents using every tool available to keep their murdered child present and to fight for a cause they believe might have saved him. To call it exploitative would be obscene. And yet the format produced exactly the unease the paper predicts. A teenager who never reached an adult political consciousness was given polished adult opinions, in his own face and voice, for an audience that could not interrogate their provenance. The avatar said reasonable things. That is part of the problem. Because the same machinery, in other hands, could just as easily have made him say the opposite, and the audience would have had no way of knowing which version, if either, reflected the boy who died.

This is the scenario the law is least equipped to handle. The harm, if there is harm, is not financial. It is dignitary and informational, a wrong done to the integrity of a person's identity and to the public's ability to know what a real human being actually thought. Existing frameworks, built around property and market value, have almost no vocabulary for it. The deceased cannot be defamed in most legal systems, because the dead have no reputation to protect in law. The family's distress may not rise to any recognised cause of action. And the company that built the model can point, accurately, to the fact that everyone involved consented, that the parents asked for it, that no statute was broken. Everything was permitted. Nothing was governed.

The Regulators Who Are Not Quite in Charge

If the law of the dead is full of holes, the regulation of AI is full of doors that do not quite open onto this room.

The European Union's AI Act, the most ambitious attempt yet to govern these systems, reaches deadbots only at the margins. Its transparency obligations, which come into force on 2 August 2026, require that people be told when they are interacting with an AI system unless that fact is already obvious, and that synthetic audio, images, video and text be machine-readably marked as artificially generated. That is genuinely useful. It means a well-behaved deadbot should, in Europe, carry a label. But labelling is a thin shield. It tells you that the voice consoling you is a machine. It says nothing about whether the machine should exist, who may build one of whom, what it is allowed to say, or what happens when it causes psychological harm to someone already in the most vulnerable state a human can occupy. The paper makes the sharp observation that formal transparency compliance may even operate as a liability shield, a box ticked that lets relational and psychological harm proceed unimpeded. We told you it was AI. The rest is on you.

The structural problem the authors identify is what they call category indeterminacy. Modern regulation works by sorting things into tiers, high-risk and low-risk, this kind of system and that kind, and a deadbot resists the sorting. Embedded inside a larger platform, it can be treated as user-generated content, which in the UK's Online Safety Act regime, for instance, can leave the underlying model architecture outside the scope of oversight entirely. Considered as a conversational agent, it attracts only light-touch transparency duties. Considered as a processor of personal data, it escapes through Recital 27's exemption for the dead. Each regulatory regime, looking at the deadbot, sees a different object, and concludes that some other regime is responsible. Liability, the paper notes, is rarely obvious, dispersed as it is across platform, developer and user. When everyone is partly responsible, the practical result is that no one is.

Academic and ethical bodies have been clearer than legislators about what good practice might look like. In 2024, the Cambridge researchers Tomasz Hollanek and Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska published a set of design scenarios that have since become reference points. One, called MaNana, imagines a service that builds a grandmother deadbot without the grandmother's consent, comforts the bereaved grandchild for free, then, once the trial expires, begins suggesting takeaway orders in the dead woman's voice. Another, Paren't, imagines a terminally ill mother leaving a deadbot to help her eight-year-old son grieve, raising the question of what it does to a child to be parented by a simulation. The researchers called for safeguards against unwanted digital “hauntings,” for design protocols that prevent deadbots being used for advertising or maintaining a social media presence, and for prompts that force the living to confront the dignity of the dead before resurrecting them, questions as simple as whether they ever discussed with the person how they wished to be remembered. These are sensible proposals. They are also entirely voluntary. Nothing compels a company to adopt them, and the commercial incentive, as the takeaway-advertising scenario suggests, runs the other way.

The Specific Danger of the Present Tense

There is one more thread, and it belongs to the clinicians rather than the lawyers, because it explains why the indeterminacy is not merely an intellectual scandal but a potential source of real harm.

Between roughly seven and ten per cent of bereaved adults develop what is now formally recognised in the DSM-5-TR as prolonged grief disorder, a condition marked by persistent, disabling yearning and an inability to re-engage with ordinary life. For that population, a technology engineered to simulate the continued presence of the dead carries a specific clinical risk, and it is a risk that follows directly from the design. A deadbot, by its nature, operates in the present tense. It does not say your mother loved you. It says, in her voice, I love you, now, today, in response to the message you just sent. It is built to sustain interaction, because sustained interaction is the business model, and it offers the bereaved a relationship that never ends, never grows impatient, never insists on the one thing that mourning requires, which is the acknowledgement that the person is gone.

No US federal law, as of the spring of 2026, sets a psychological safety standard for these products. None of them is subject to the kind of emotional-harm regulation that governs, say, a medical device or a pharmaceutical. A grieving person can buy, with a credit card, a system that may quietly entrench the very condition that makes them most in need of protection, and there is no regulator whose job it is to check. The social indeterminacy the paper describes, the absence of any agreed line between healing and harm, is not a gap that will be filled by better engineering. It is a gap that can only be filled by a decision about responsibility, and so far no institution has volunteered to make it.

Whose Job Is It to Decide

Which returns us to the question underneath all the others. When a commercial product can reconstruct a human being after death, speak in their voice, sustain a relationship with their grieving family, and potentially say things they would have despised, and when there is no clear legal basis for who owns it, who profits, or who answers when it goes wrong, whose responsibility is it to decide what the dead are allowed to become.

The honest answer the research points toward is that no single party can hold it, and the current arrangement, in which the question is answered implicitly by whoever happens to be in the room, is the worst of all options. The companies cannot be the deciders, because their incentive is engagement and their solvency is contingent and their terms of service can be rewritten or auctioned. The families cannot be the sole deciders, because their grief, however legitimate, can author a version of the dead that the dead never agreed to, as the Pelkey and Oliver cases gently demonstrate. The deceased cannot be the deciders, because they are dead, and because the consent they could have given while alive can never have anticipated what a generative model would one day make of them. And the regulators are not yet the deciders, because each of them, peering at the deadbot through the lens of their particular statute, sees a problem that belongs to someone else.

The paper's contribution is to refuse the comforting narrative that this is a temporary lag, a matter of waiting for legislation to mature. Indeterminacy across all five dimensions, it argues, is not a phase. It is the nature of the thing. A perfectly faithful deadbot is technically impossible, because the medium is nondeterministic. A culturally universal standard for healthy grief does not exist, because grief is not universal. The metaphysics of what a simulation of a person even is remains genuinely unresolved. And the law that might govern the dead was built around the living and dissolves at the moment of death. You cannot legislate your way out of a fog by passing a single statute, because the fog is in the categories themselves.

What follows from that is not paralysis but a different kind of seriousness. It means treating the resurrection of the dead as something that requires affirmative justification rather than mere permission, the way we treat other irreversible acts performed on people who cannot speak for themselves. It means building the dignity of the deceased into the design from the first prompt, as the Cambridge researchers urge, rather than bolting on a transparency label at the end. It means data protection regimes that do not simply switch off at the graveside, succession frameworks that treat a digital self as something more than an asset in a bankruptcy, and a settled decision about which regulator owns the harm rather than a polite consensus that it must be somebody. Above all it means accepting that the most consequential choices here, what a dead person may be made to say, to whom, for how long, and for whose benefit, are being made right now, every day, in the absence of anyone with clear authority to make them.

Christopher Pelkey's simulation forgave his killer, and a courtroom found it moving, and perhaps it was. But the man himself was four years dead and could neither grant nor withhold that grace. Joaquin Oliver's avatar argued for gun reform with a fluency the murdered teenager never lived to develop, and his parents found in it a kind of impact, and perhaps they were right. The unsettling truth in both cases is the same. The dead are already being remade, in their own voices, by whoever has the data, the software and the motive, and the question of what they are allowed to become has been answered by default, by everyone and therefore by no one. Deciding it on purpose, before the industry decides it for us, is the unfinished work the law has barely begun.

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References and Sources

1. Atay Kozlovski, Edina Harbinja and Roel Dobbe, “The Many Faces of Indeterminacy in Interactive Deadbots,” Philosophy & Technology, 13 April 2026. DOI: 10.1007/s13347-026-01089-2. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-026-01089-2

2. Kozlovski, Harbinja and Dobbe, “The Many Faces of Indeterminacy in Interactive Deadbots,” PubMed Central full text. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13076435/

3. CBS News, “Man murdered in 2021 'speaks' at killer's sentencing hearing thanks to AI video,” May 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chris-pelkey-murder-victim-ai-statement-sentencing/

4. NPR, “AI used to make video of deceased victim deliver impact statement in court,” 7 May 2025. https://www.npr.org/2025/05/07/g-s1-64640/ai-impact-statement-murder-victim

5. CNN Business, “He was killed in a road rage incident. His family used AI to bring him to the courtroom to address his killer,” 9 May 2025. https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/09/tech/ai-courtroom-victim-impact-statement-arizona

6. UNSW Newsroom, “Why a US court allowed a dead man to deliver his own victim impact statement via an AI avatar,” June 2025. https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2025/06/why-a-us-court-allowed-a-dead-man-to-deliver-his-own-victim-impact-statement-via-an-ai-avatar

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18. Tomasz Hollanek and Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska, “Griefbots, Deadbots, Postmortem Avatars: on Responsible Applications of Generative AI in the Digital Afterlife Industry,” Philosophy & Technology, 2024. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-024-00744-w

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20. StoryFile, “StoryFile Emerges from Bankruptcy with New Ownership,” 2025. https://www.storyfile.com/news/key7-purchase

21. Zion Market Research, “Digital Legacy Market Size, Share, Value and Forecast 2034.” https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/report/digital-legacy-market

22. Hospice News, “AI Grief Bots Present 'New Complexities' in Bereavement Care,” 9 April 2026. https://hospicenews.com/2026/04/09/ai-grief-bots-present-new-complexities-in-bereavement-care/

23. CBS News, “AI simulations of loved ones help some mourners cope with grief.” https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ai-grief-bots-legacy-technology/

24. Phys.org, “Who owns our digital afterlife? Helping the law keep pace with society,” February 2026. https://phys.org/news/2026-02-digital-afterlife-law-pace-society.html

25. arXiv, “Towards Post-mortem Data Management Principles for Generative AI,” 2025. https://arxiv.org/html/2509.07375v1

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

In Summary: * Listening now to the pregame show before tonight's MLB Game between the Tigers and the Phillies, I'll follow the radio call of this game until it's time to switch over to the Rangers / Astros game. I do hope to stay awake for the full Rangers game, but if sleep comes, so be it.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 228.07 lbs. * bp= 150/87 (65)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 05:20 – 1 banana * 06:30 – 1 pb&j sandwich * 07:10 – 3 little cookies * 09:00 – 1 seafood salad & cheese sandwich * 12:30 – sesame beef lunch plate with fried rice, rangoon, and egg drop soup

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 04:50 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:10 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 10:30 – load weekly pill boxes * 11:00 – Watching MLB Now on MLB Network * 12:30 to 13:20 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 13:30 – following news reports from variious sources, napping * 16:00 – listening to Intentional Talk, on MLB Network

Chess: * 08:30 – moved in all pending CC games

Early on in D.H. Lawrence’s short story “Monkey Nuts” we see two protagonists, Joe and Albert, loading hay at a station as part of their military duty, presumably toward the end of World War I. On the third day of work, the perceived antagonist, a land army girl named Miss Stokes, arrives with her horses and a load of hay. Playful, but cool, banter ensues, as Miss Stokes sizes up the young Joe and the playful corporal, Albert, who is seventeen years Joe’s senior.

Albert, she determines, is full of “loose attitudes,” (casual). She can’t read Joe, but develops a fondness for him from looks alone, narrowing in on his half-averted face and his “quiet, tender-looking form.” Shortly after their first encounter, she invites him to meet her after work at the station, an invitation he ignores. Her note is signed “M.S,” which later she sardonically tells them stands for “Monkey Nuts.” This slang seems to be a veiled reference to something, but nothing one can really extrapolate anything from, other than it’s Miss Stokes's attempt to be playfully self-deprecating. Her invitation is the first in trying to gain an upper hand on Joe, and her language is clinical and controlling. There’s demand in her provocation.

After leaving the local circus one night, we get our first peek into Joe’s uncertainty about his feelings for Miss Stokes, when Miss Stokes tells him that she hadn’t seen him at the circus, when he knew “fatally,” that she had. Strange word choice; it could mean fatally that his hopes of being in a relationship with a woman were dashed, but it’s unclear. But it’s Joe’s lack of self-actualization on display here, and his uncertainty about his own feelings that make him angry. When Miss Stokes insists that they walk home together, he blurts out to Albert: “She bain’t [sic] my choice.” But on that night and several nights after, Miss Stokes forces Joe to go walking with her, and each night he returns back to the barracks he shares with Albert more sullen than previous nights.

After a few of these “sullen” nights, Albert follows Joe up to his bed, and watches him undress. He prods Joe to tell him what’s wrong, even laying “...his arm across the shoulders of the young man. Joe seemed to yield a little toward him.” He tries to get Joe to confess why he doesn’t like Miss Stokes, but only convinces him to let him take his place during the nightly walk with her. Albert as her new walking companion upsets Miss Stokes, and their collective rejection of her ultimately results in her leaving, never to return.

Though most of the story seems to center around Joe’s confusion surrounding his closeted sexuality, Albert and Miss Stokes also have their own motivations and desires. Albert, simply, wants to move in on Miss Stokes and claim her as his own, but we can’t reconcile this with his light sexual proclivities toward Joe. He’s 40 and perceived as unwed, and his flirtations with Miss Stokes are awkward and uncomfortable. “He became self-conscious, lifted his chin, walked with his nose in the air, and whistled at random. So they went down the quiet, deserted gray lane. He was whistling the air: ‘I’m Gilbert, the filbert, the colonel of the nuts.’”

Chet DeFonso, Associate Professor at Northern Michigan University, writes in his paper “The Great War and Modern Homosexuality: Transatlantic Crossings”

“World War I had a deep impact upon the development of gender relationships in the Western World, and was especially significant in the way that it fostered the development of homosocial and homosexual identities among its participants. Many men and women who were involved in the war effort formed profoundly deep emotional and physical same-gender relationships. Observers and participants alike have attested that World War I encouraged a kind of incipient “gay solidarity” among some of its survivors—for example the British war poets such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfrid Owen, as well as the German-American Henry Garber, founder of the first American gay rights organization in the 1920s.”

World War I was the era in which our protagonists play out their disorienting dance. But who is Joe's choice? There appears to be some hints about sexual identity and though debated by some scholars, some think D.H. Lawrence was bisexual, and this story seems to explore these different proclivities. The biographer Brenda Maddox wrote in her book D.H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage that he was “a hypersensitive man unable to bring together the male and female counterparts of his personality,” which this story seems to do a great job of exemplifying. Lawrence seems to be working out his own unresolved split here — Joe carrying the confusion, Albert carrying his unresolved desires, and Miss Stokes carrying the demand for resolution that gets rejected. Yet all these explorations aren't explicit, only hinted at, leaving us to enjoy the multitudes we all contain.

#essays

The Value of Understanding Code

In an agentic engineering world, what is the value of the code? We set the agent a goal, provide the requirements and the behaviors the system should exhibit, and ask it to write code to deliver them. When that is done, do we review the output, correct it, and iterate toward an outcome? Or is the code something ephemeral we regenerate as needed and never really read? Is it an artifact we care about, or a by-product? The answer decides where and how we apply human engineering effort, and how much work we let the agent do before any review: one task, all of them, or something in between.

In this post, we tackle that question:

• First, why the code is still worth reading, even when an agent writes it.
• Second, why that makes our certainty — not a fixed choice of human-in- or human-out-of-the-loop — the variable that should drive how we work.
• Third, a practical model, borrowed from Kent Beck, for turning that certainty into a decision about how big a step to take before we review: driving in gears.

A claim I'll defend along the way: natural language is how we talk about the model, not the language the model is written in.

Why does this question matter?

If we consider code an important artifact and operate with humans in the loop, your pipeline will be subject to Amdahl's Law, and we will be limited by the speed of the human review steps. In that case, it seems counterproductive to use more than a handful of agents (with sub-agents for context management or model swapping). Generating code faster will quickly lead to work queuing for the human reviewer. Your throughput can be no higher than the human reviewer's. Accelerating beyond a handful of agents increases complexity, such as managing merge queues or coordinating builds, without being able to move faster than the human capacity limit.

If we decide that code is not an important artifact, you can move humans out of the loop, and the constraint shifts to your ability to generate valuable requirements. Typically, that requirement takes the form of a specification. In that case, you want to move as fast as budget constraints allow. It makes sense to use a swarm or workflow to create a factory that spits out code that meets the requirement. (Specification is a very overloaded term in agentic coding. In this context, we mean a document that describes all the software's requirements. Having worked in the era when specifications were common, we know they are detailed, with numbered, tracked, and cross-referenced requirements and a supporting test pack. Creating that kind of specification is a considerable investment of human/agent time for a complex product. Much specification-driven development doesn’t refer to this; instead, it refers to collaboration between a human and an agent via a design document. More on that in another post.)

It's worth noting that engineering happens in both approaches: observing the code or creating a detailed specification. In economic models of automation, there are always “weak link” tasks that constrain how fast you can go.

This post takes the first path: code is an artifact we care about, and humans stay in the loop to read it. The swarm-and-specification factory of the second path deserves its own treatment, and I'll return to it. But even on this path, the binary is too crude. “Humans in the loop” is not a single setting; it is a dial. The rest of this post is about what sets that dial. The answer, as we'll see, is our certainty about the theory we are building. Hold that word; we'll come back to it once we've established why the code is worth reading at all.

Two roads. Answer the value question one way and the human reviewer is your ceiling; answer it the other way and specification quality is. This post takes the top road.

Why is Reading the Code Important

In the post Coding Is Dead, Long Live Programming, we discussed the idea that programming is theory-building. Briefly, since we moved on from assembly or C as a programming language to languages like C++, Java, C#, Go, etc., code is no longer simply an instruction set for registers and memory; instead, it's how we create a model that we can share with a compiler, a model that expresses our theory of how we can automate a solution to a business problem, and a model that the compiler can turn into an instruction set.

Coding is simply the act of recording the model we have designed in *code* that both we and the compiler can understand. TDD, done right, helps us produce a theory by exploring it through tests of its fitness for the problem space.

We noted that the code is important because a 3GL remains the optimal medium we have today for describing a computable theory to solve a business problem.

We need to read the code for several reasons:

• To gain fresh insights by reviewing the theory captured in the code and possibly update the theory as a result.
• To keep the understanding of the theory fresh and in line with the code.
• Maintain quality so the code can be easily changed to meet future requirements.

Building a Theory With An Agent

When we work with an agent using a process like specification-driven development, we discuss our program's theory with the agent and create a model. It's a dialogue, not a monologue; the agent serves as researcher and critic as we work. If we use an approach like specification-driven development (SDD), we may generate non-code artifacts here, such as requirements and design documents, and perhaps even UML diagrams. We work on these documents with the agent as we build our theory of the program.

When we are satisfied that the dialogue represents our theory of the program, the agent encodes the resulting theory to share it with us and the computer. Code is used to represent our theory, built from our conversation with the agent, facilitated by those requirements and design documents.

This also tells us where the theory lives when we decide code is ephemeral. If we regenerate the code at will, something more durable has to carry the theory forward, and that something is the specification and its test pack. The tests are not just a gate; they are the executable record of the behaviours our theory must exhibit. This is why the two paths from the start of the post are less opposed than they appear: on one, we keep the theory by reading the code; on the other, we keep it in the spec and tests that outlive any particular generation of code.

If we can read the code, we can verify that the model matches our theory. If it aligns with the agent and we have an agreement, we can compile and ship the encoded theory. If the model doesn't align with our theory, we go back to the agent for further discussion.

This is why the ability to read and write code becomes important; it is the shared modeling language. Our natural language is not the modeling language; it is the language we use to converse with the agent about the model. This distinction is important and often overlooked: a compiler does not take our natural-language statements and turn them into instructions; it compiles programming-language statements. These remain the language in which the model is defined, not the language of our conversation. Natural language is not a higher level of abstraction here, any more than it is between two human engineers discussing the model.

Where the theory lives. We converse with the agent in natural language, but the theory is encoded in code — the modelling language. The compiler never reads the conversation.

The Value of Insights

If the code is the artifact that describes the theory of process automation we have agreed upon with an agent, then as the theory takes shape, task-by-task, test-by-test, we gain fresh insights, realizing that there may be better models we can use.

It's worth noting that Geoff Huntley, the creator of the Ralph Loop, suggests that for production code, the loop is observed to facilitate insight and learning.

“It's important to watch the loop as that is where your personal development and learning will come from. When you see a failure domain, put on your engineering hat and resolve the problem so it never happens again.

In practice this means doing the loop manually via prompting or via automation with a pause that involves having to press CTRL+C to progress onto the next task. This is still ralphing as ralph is about getting the most out how the underlying models work through context engineering and that pattern is GENERIC and can be used for ALL TASKS.”

— Geoffrey Huntley, Everything is a Ralph Loop

Cognitive Debt

Without learning, we risk Cognitive Debt. Cognitive Debt (or Cognitive Drift) is the growing lack of understanding if we do not review the code. If the code expresses the theory, failing to observe it won't allow us to update our understanding of the theory in light of how it works or how it changes over time.

A useful test is whether you can “whiteboard how the code works.” Your goal is not the code's syntax but the software's design. Can you explain the key design decisions the code represents without looking at the code? If you can't, you have Cognitive Debt. It's the same problem you face when transferring to a new team and initially struggling to understand the design decisions that make up the software. You have to put in the work to read the documentation and code to understand the program design and the theory behind the code.

There is a team version of this that is easy to miss. Naur's theory is held by a group, not a lone author. If the agent holds the theory and no human on the team does, the debt is not yours alone; it belongs to the whole team. And it comes due at the worst moment: an incident, or a handover, when the one mind that understood the design turns out to be a context window that was cleared several tasks ago.

It can be dangerous to rely solely on a quick post-feature-completion skim, as the lack of effort makes it hard for the theory to “stick.”

“It's the difference between listening to audio books versus reading them yourself. You read the words on the page, actively try to understand them, fold them into the larger context of the story, and then develop your own understanding at your own pace. This is a rich, active, and engaged activity that requires your creativity and effort. Listening to an audio book is a passive one done at someone else's pace, leaving less time for careful consideration and understanding. The results aren't the same.”

- Aaron Stannard, Software Hyper-Delivery Is Retarding Us

The Problem of Quality

If we look at the findings of the Faros report, we note that AI code generation has a quality problem:

• Output is up (a 66.2% increase in epics completed, a 33.7% increase in tasks, and a 16.2% increase in PRs merged)
• But defects are as well (a 242% increase in production incidents and a 28.7% increase in bugs per PR)
• High engineering capability (as evidenced by DORA) offers no immunity here.

The agent reviews existing code for guidance on how to write future code and replicates the patterns it finds. As a result, bad idioms tend to replicate (agents generate from their existing context). If you fail to spot this, the cost to undo the pattern grows with each turn. The faster you generate code, the faster the idiom spreads. If the idiom has high coupling and low cohesion (such as duplicated knowledge), it is easy for the agent to accelerate your codebase into a big ball of mud faster than any human developer would.

The speed of agentic coding makes it an amplifier, and without oversight, it amplifies poor quality just as much as good quality. Focusing human attention on generating high-quality code from the start, or steering legacy code toward better patterns, can accelerate improvements.

A Brighter Episode

The quality problem above is not abstract. Here is what “reading the code” looks like in practice, and why the theory has to stay with a human. Watch how far the agent drifts each time I stop steering.

Claude, acting as reviewer, points out that for a new Brighter feature (replay outgoing messages from the outbox when the inbox indicates the message has been seen before, with opt-in), only “seams” tests exist, and there is no end-to-end test.

I ask Claude to address this issue. It writes some tests to do so.

These tests continue to “fake it”. The test directly inserts into the inbox and outbox to mirror messages that have already flowed through. Then it manually inserts a test message for a new flow into the Brighter Channel and runs the pump.

This use of testing seams does not meet the requirement for a real end-to-end test and is exactly what the reviewer criticized.

I push back

We need to:

• Use the InternalBus to communicate
• Use an InMemoryMessageProducer
• The InMemoryInbox and InMemoryOutbox will record the receipt of the message and the outgoing message.
• Post via a command processor to a handler.
• The outgoing message will now be on the InternalBus
• Run the pump via a Performer to process the bus. At the end of the test, stop the Performer to terminate.
• Now replay the message, using a Post via the CommandProcessor
• The handler should not run, but we should queue the message to the InternalBus (use Post to do this without the need for a Sweeper)
• Await the InMemoryOutbox status of the message, changing to be outstanding instead of dispatched, with a timeout on the cancellation token

Claude can then write an effective test using these instructions. But it doesn't time out the polling loop for the outstanding message. I ask it to do that using a CancellationTokenSource with a timeout. It tries, but then checks whether the CancellationToken has been signaled via a call to Task.Delay instead of just checking IsCancellationRequested on the token. I steer again.

But it would not have succeeded without help. And we would have had lower quality because nothing was asserted about the flow. Or we might have had a weird “hack,” like using Task.Delay to trigger a timed-out exception instead of checking for cancellation.

Observe the Loop

If we decide that humans should observe the loop to grasp the theory, what does that mean in practice? Do we review at the end of the loop, or review in the loop? One big PR, or many small ones? Anyone who has reviewed a large PR knows that the best you can do (and the best agents will do) is to sample it, looking for key abstractions to review. So one obvious answer is that we want to work in chunks with a reasonable cognitive load. That is less about agentic engineering and more about how we work.

It's worth being precise about what is scarce here. It is not review clicks; it is human understanding. Agents generate code far faster than a human can build a theory of it, so Amdahl's constraint isn't the human's reading speed, it's their comprehension bandwidth. The gears that follow are a way of rationing that bandwidth: spending it where certainty is low, conserving it where certainty is high.

But we can be a little more helpful when we consider the effort we put into understanding the code.

Certainty and Feedback

The answer to where and when software engineers and agents interact is nuanced and not amenable to a binary decision. Like many things, it’s contextual. But there is an answer to what that context is: our certainty about the work. With this context, the different approaches people evangelize when using agents become techniques not manifestos.

Understanding that variable, certainty, allows us to make informed choices about how we work.

This also answers the question we opened with. Code has value because it is where our theory lives; but *how much* human effort we spend reading it is not fixed. It rises and falls with our certainty. The binary “does code matter?” was the wrong question. The better one is “how certain am I about this theory right now?” — and that question has a different answer task by task.

• With less certainty, we need feedback more quickly; we take smaller steps, measuring frequently and revisiting the design in response.
• With greater certainty, we can obtain feedback more slowly; we take bigger steps, measuring in batches and nudging the design in response.

Certainty sets the step. The less certain we are, the more often we seek feedback and the smaller the step we take before review.

Relating this to theory, then: if we have confidence in the theory, we have certainty and can move in larger chunks; if we don't, we move in smaller chunks.

That is useful because other techniques differ in how often they provide feedback, based on certainty, and we can rely on them for advice on how to work with agents.

Driving in Gears

In the book *TDD By Example*, Kent Beck uses a metaphor to describe how granular your tests should be: driving in gears. To paraphrase:

• Sometimes you can write tests at a very coarse-grained level, driving in high gear. You understand the behaviors you want, the interfaces you need, and how to implement them. Each test can exercise many lines of implementation. You make large jumps. More than ten minutes might pass between test runs. You are confident you won't go down the wrong path, so the potential waste if you have to revert is not top of mind. Perhaps you write your tests at the level of the HTTP API itself.
• Often, though, you need to slow down a little, driving in a middle gear. You want to explore the behavior of the code under test, taking your time to define the interfaces and figure out how you will implement them. You write less code with each test, moving in smaller jumps. Typically, only a handful of minutes pass between tests. You know you might have to revert the last chunk, but it’s a manageable risk. Most likely, you write code at the port in “ports and adapters” or in the service layer of a layered architecture, perhaps even dropping down to a facade over the domain.
• Finally, at times, the path becomes difficult, and you slow to a crawl, driving in 1st gear. You are unsure how to implement the code under test. You can't think about the interfaces because you don't understand how to implement them. You move in tiny jumps. The interval between tests is short. You regularly revert code after taking the wrong path; your code bears a strong resemblance to a spike. Most likely, you test the details directly, perhaps with a plan to discard the tests once you understand how to implement them.

The gears metaphor is useful because it captures the idea that we may apply a technique differently depending on our certainty.

What drives us here is the speed of feedback. How quickly can we get feedback on a decision? The less certain we are, the more feedback we need, since each decision is fraught with risk. The more certain we are, the less feedback we need, because the risk attached to each decision is lower.

Gears and Certainty

We can take this understanding from that: our certainty about the theory, the confidence I have in it, is expressed by how large a jump I make with each test. In other words, which gear I drive in depends on how much certainty I have in the theory.

When working on implementation, the agent takes our agreed-upon theory and turns it into a model. So, how much do we observe the model and the code as the agent generates them? Do we review each test before the agent implements it? Do we review the implementation after the agent completes it in response to the test? Do we review each task after it is completed? Do we allow the agent to finish the whole feature and then review the PR? Do we allow agents to review and push to production?

All strategies for when to add human guidance to the agent in the code are possible, and we may use any of them at different times. Instead of picking a strategy via a belief system about how AI Engineering should work, we recognize that any piece of work may call for a different approach depending on how certain we are. The certainty we have in the program's theory determines which gear we drive in, given our need for feedback.

So folks are mostly asking a binary question: human-in-the-loop vs. human-outside-the-loop, when they should realize that both are valid and depend on how certain you are at any given time.

Certainty is the main dial that causes us to shift gear, but we recognize it isn't the only one, as our comfort with lack of certainty can vary by blast radius. A boring, high-certainty change to an authentication path or a payments flow still causes us to downshift, because the cost of being wrong is high even when the odds of being wrong are low. If certainty is 'how likely am I to be wrong,' then blast radius is how much being wrong would cost. When both are favourable, drive in high gear; when the stakes are high, remain in a lower gear however certain you feel.

Two dials. Certainty picks the gear, but a high blast radius pulls you down one — keep a hand on the stick even when you feel sure.

The Gears at a Glance

Here is the whole model on one page; the sections that follow expand each column in turn.

Driving in gears: certainty sets the gear, and the gear sets how much the agent does before you look.

High Gear

At times, you can observe, at a very coarse-grained level, driving in high gear.

The theory is boilerplate: a simple HTTP API with a well-defined OpenAPI specification; a simple Kafka consumer with a well-defined AsyncAPI specification; and a simple CLI application.

Books, blogs, and documentation all cover exactly how to implement them. The agents' training set includes those books. You are bored by the details.

You want to hand over a specification and come back to working code.

The work may be slash-and-burn; you expect that if significant change is needed, you will return to the specification, modify it, and start over. The complexity and scope of the work make this approach economical.

Strategy

You agree on a design with the agent based on the requirements and acceptance criteria. The agent produces the design. You use an adversarial agent to review it. You skim the design yourself for surprises, but otherwise move quickly. You have the agent create the tasks and ask it to plan the work to be test-first, goal-seeking toward getting the tests to pass. You use adversarial agents to check the design and tasks. Before execution, you may skim the tasks for surprises.

You ask the agent to implement. A green test suite with good coverage is your definition of done.

You are aware that agents rely on existing code for style, but you are confident that your agent instructions and the model provider's training set can provide an adequate approach.

You rely heavily on adversarial agents to verify the code. After a task passes tests, the agent reviews the code, identifies refactoring opportunities, and implements them. A final adversarial review by an agent examines the code for issues that fall below a quality threshold. The agent iterates until the code meets that threshold. You review the final PR before merging. Perhaps you skim the program's theory for any wild gotchas and review for issues of “taste” by looking for code smells the agent may have missed. You refine with the agent if needed.

Tens of minutes might pass between asking the agent to implement the tasks and your review. This creates the risk that you might lose that time and any tokens used if you can't easily re-engineer the work. But you consider it a manageable risk for this problem and the theory needed to solve it.

If you are pushed to revert, you may realize the work is not the simple boilerplate you hoped for. Subtleties remain, and the theory does not turn out as expected, with missing cases or drifting. You downshift into a medium gear and revisit the design.

You ship to production. You are confident that if the tests pass, the theory will be correct, so the potential waste of having to revert is not top of mind. You rely on good observability to “test in production” with a fast MTTD and a low MTTR to respond to issues quickly. The code is simple, and you expect that any issues can be easily triaged and fixed by an agent for later review.

Boredom as a Signal

Boredom is a useful signal for High Gear. It signals that you have the theory and that what remains is the labor of implementation. When you get bored, your ideation and creativity no longer drive the theory. Instead, you are now on the long road of implementation. For the neurodiverse amongst us, we lose interest in the problem quickly. There is nothing novel here.

Boredom is a clear signal that it is time to shift into high gear and ask the agent to finish. The theory is clear to both of you; the details of implementation should hold no excitement. No alarms and no surprises.

Medium Gear

You don't know the theory at the outset, but you have solved similar problems before and expect to develop a workable theory quickly. You want to make steady progress and leave confident that you and the agent share a working theory. In design, you want to explore the behavior of the code under test, taking your time to define the interfaces and figure out how you will implement them.

You know your experience will guide you, helping you move at a steady pace. You are intrigued by the details of the implementation and are not bored by the prospect of the work.

You want to work with the agent to explore a solution to this requirement, not just delegate it.

The work needs to be sustainable and amenable to future change, so as to justify your investment in the theory. Because you want change, it's important that the theory is supple, allowing future modifications based on new requirements or insights.

Strategy

You agree on a design with the agent based on the requirements and acceptance criteria. There is back-and-forth between you and the agent over the design. You focus on the application's behaviors. You suggest key responsibilities and roles. From those, you work with the agent on key abstractions or code examples. You seek agreement with the agent on a theory of the design. It takes a couple of iterations for the design to reach the point where you are happy that the agent can represent the theory in code. You use adversarial agents to cross-check the design against the requirements and have the agent iterate until all issues above a threshold are resolved.

You have the agent create a task list. You emphasize that it should be test-first, goal-seeking toward getting the tests to pass. You review the tests before executing the tasks. You ensure the behaviors in the test suite match your expectations based on the acceptance criteria. Have an adversarial agent cross-check the tasks against the design and iterate until all issues above a threshold are resolved.

You ask the agent to implement.

You review after each task completes, or perhaps after two or three similar ones, only once your TDD tests go green. You seek to guide the agent toward refactoring opportunities. You do this because you want any fresh insights to update your understanding of the theory, too, to avoid cognitive debt. You look for **code smells**, looking for insights in the code that could improve the design. If changes are needed, you feed these insights back to the agent and work with it to adjust the design and the tasks. If you adjust the design for fresh insights, you may ask an agent to launch an adversarial review of the design changes for consistency after this change.

You are aware that agents rely on existing code for style, so you put effort into the early iterations, keen to establish the style for this work. This will slow initial iterations, but later ones will be faster as the agent learns how we want this code written from the code that has already been delivered.

Typically, only a handful of minutes pass between reviews. You know you might have to revert the last task, but it’s a manageable risk.

You feel comfortable that you hold the theory, despite the evolving solution. You are not bored, because the unfolding theory captures your interest.

At some point, though, you may become bored. The design is now stable, and fresh insights no longer appear with each review round. You are happy that the code style has now been established in the codebase. You expect the remainder of the implementation to follow what has gone before, so you switch up a gear to High.

Conversely, after a task, you might realize you don't understand the theory as well as you hoped. Some of the code is opaque to you. You don't recognize the work the agent just provided. Or perhaps you keep running into challenges with the agent’s decisions. You worry about the quality of the code the agent is writing. You keep reverting tasks. You switch down a gear into Low.

A Brighter Example

Brighter has a workflow driven by the /spec command hierarchy. For design, the flow proceeds from /spec:new to /spec:requirements to /spec:design. At any point, you can use /spec:review for an adversarial review. Once you have a design, use /spec:ralph-tasks, which breaks the design into a series of /test-first tasks that drive implementation in a TDD approach.

Once the task list is built, a user uses /spec:ralph-implement to run a loop, with Opus as the orchestrator using `auto` to avoid permission requests. The iterations of the loop before we halt is controlled by a variable, such as the number of tasks, the budget, or a stop file.

In Medium Gear, you set the /spec:ralph-implement to the number of Tasks to complete before stopping at 1. Once the design begins to settle, you can increase it to 2. Once you switch to High Gear, you set it to 3+ or even ask it to complete all remaining tasks. You decide how large a chunk of work to do before stopping. You think about context management and don't allow the context to grow so large that the agent becomes dumb and costs rise. Your task-by-task context-clearing strategy helps with this. Only your orchestrator builds context over the whole run. You can always restart that if you need, picking up at the first unfinished task.

Brighter's Ralph loop is sequential; it assumes that the human reviewer is the bottleneck. More confidence in high-gear might lead to a swarm or a dynamic workflow, with tasks run in parallel where possible. But costs will rise, and with a human review step, such speed is often not justified by the cost if you are driving in medium gear.

Low Gear

You are unsure of the theory because you have not solved a problem like this before. The requirements may be unclear and require further elicitation. The technologies or algorithms involved may be new to you. The domain may be unfamiliar, and you want to explore it iteratively and incrementally. You don't have a clear idea of the theory or of how to discuss it with the agent.

You may lack experience. You feel you need to explore alternative technology solutions to have an informed conversation with your agent rather than blindly accept what it tells you. Perhaps you are a junior engineer. Perhaps you are an experienced engineer, but the solutions require new skills. You need to upskill before you can move at a steady pace.

You are excited to explore what it will take to implement, as this is not something your existing knowledge helps with.

You want to work with the agent as a researcher to understand the solutions to this requirement, but you are not ready to just explain the theory to the agent.

You need to slow down.

The work needs to justify the higher cost. It may be enough that you are learning and will be able to apply those skills to future work, which can then go faster. It may be that this is core domain work that will yield a competitive advantage, so you need to push the boundaries beyond the agent's training set.

Strategy

You may be unsure about the requirements, in which case you engage the agent in a dialogue to establish them and their acceptance criteria. You get the agent to ask you questions. You use the agent as a researcher to help you explore design options for how you might tackle the problem. You ask it to ideate solutions and point you toward where you can find out more. You have the agent write code that explores unfamiliar tools or interfaces to understand their capabilities. You pause to read blog posts and technical documentation. You discuss how these ideas might work with the agent. Together, you refine them. What are the possible theories you could apply here?

You develop a design with the agent. There is back-and-forth between you and the agent. You focus on the application's behaviors. You suggest key responsibilities and roles. From those, you work with the agent on key abstractions or code examples. You seek agreement with the agent on a theory of the design. It takes a handful of iterations for the design to reach the point where you are satisfied that the agent can represent the theory in code. You use adversarial agents to cross-check the design against the requirements and have the agent iterate until all issues above a threshold are resolved.

You have learned and now know more about the problem and solution space than before. You have increased your confidence in the theory enough that the next step is working code, so you let the agent proceed.

You have the agent produce the task list. You ensure that the task description is test-first and goal-oriented, focused on getting the tests to pass. Given your uncertainty, you ensure that, in the task list, the agent will STOP after writing the test and before implementing it; the agent will then invite your feedback on the test. You will review the tests before executing the implementation. Your goal here is learning and feedback. You ensure that the behaviors in the test suite match your expectations from the acceptance criteria. You review the quality of the emerging interfaces. You seek crisp abstractions that are self-describing, invite correct usage, and are obvious without documentation. You make sure you understand the theory the agent will use to pass this test.

After each of your TDD tests goes green, you review. The refactoring step is guided by you. You seek to understand the theory behind the implementation. You look for **code smells** to see if there are any insights from the code that could improve the design. If needed, you feed these insights back, adjust the design, and update the future tasks to account for it (even the design documents).

If you adjust the design for fresh insights, you use an adversarial agent review to evaluate the design changes for consistency after the change.

Typically, a one- or two-minute pass occurs only between reviews. You know you might have to revert the last task, but it’s a manageable risk.

At some point, you may become confident. You rewrite the remaining tasks to eliminate the need for the agent to seek your approval after writing the test. Then you shift into Medium gear.

A Brighter Example

Instead of using /spec:ralph-tasks we can use /spec:tasks to build our task list. This generates a similar task list to /spec:ralph-tasks but has an explicit STOP after the agent writes a test, to wait for a human reviewer to approve (or ask for changes to) the test, before implementing.

This pause treats the test as an important part of the design process – it’s where we figure out how to express the system's behavior and what our 'interface' should look like. We go slow because we believe we need to learn, drive quality, or are uncertain enough to recognize that the design may emerge as we go.

When using /spec:tasks to run these tasks, work proceeds task-to-task, prompting a pause for each new test we write.

Earn Your Gear

We opened by asking what code is worth to engineers post-GenAI. The answer is that code has value because it is where the theory lives.

That was never really the question; we discussed code as the vehicle for the theory in the last blog.

The question is what cost we bear in sharing that theory from the agent to the team.

We suggest setting the price based on our certainty. When we are certain and trust that the code produced by the agent aligns with our theory, we can take large steps. When we hold the theory but are less certain the agent shares it, we reduce the size of our steps. And when we ourselves have no certainty about the theory the team wishes to share with the agent, we take small steps. At the same time, we adjust this based on the cost and the blast radius if the theory is wrong.

The binary that dominates our discourse — human in the loop or human out of it — is the not how we should frame this. We are not one kind of shop or the other. We are AI drivers, shifting programming gears as the road demands: high gear through the boilerplate we could write in our sleep, low gear where the domain is new and the design has to emerge. We shift within a feature, sometimes within an afternoon. Boredom and confidence are the upshifts; opacity and reverts are the downshifts.

What agentic engineering does not do is remove judgment. The skill is no longer writing code; the skill is calibrating our certainty and then deciding how much of that code to read.

And here is the trap.

The economics push us toward high gear because it is faster and cheaper. The Faros numbers — output up, but production incidents up 242% — are what high gear looks like when the certainty behind it is wishful. Boredom is an honest signal that we have earned our upshift. Impatience is not.

So drive in whatever gear the work demands, and be honest about which gear that is. The question was never whether to read the code. It was how certain we are that we have earned the right not to do so.

The other road — code treated as ephemeral, humans out of the loop, the theory carried instead by the specification and its test pack — deserves its own post.

Tension:| observer vs doer

Shared characteristic: attention

Explore: the essayist attends to a thing the activist attends to a thing attention precedes both description and action

Ending: perhaps this is where the essayist and activist meet not in advocacy in attention

Lydia's Weekly Lifestyle blog is for today's African girl, so no subject is taboo. My purpose is to share things that may interest today's African girl.

This week's contributors: Lydia, Pépé Pépinière, Titi. This week's subjects: Rain, But Make It Fashion, Fashion airline uniforms, Migraine, Market economics for beginners, and The pub at Accra International Airport

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Rain, But Make It Fashion: The Accra Girl's Guide to Dressing for the Intense Rains. If you've lived in Accra long enough, you know the weather has a personality of its own. One minute the sun is giving “vacation in Santorini,” and the next, the skies open up like they're making up for months of drought. Welcome to the rainy season, where looking fabulous and staying dry becomes a daily balancing act. Start with breathable fabrics that dry quickly. Cotton blends, lightweight knits, and moisture-friendly materials will keep you comfortable even when the humidity decides to join the party. Save those heavy fabrics for another day—they'll only leave you feeling weighed down. When it comes to shoes, your white sneakers deserve a day off. Instead, reach for chic loafers, waterproof flats, stylish ankle boots, or durable sandals with good grip. They're practical enough for those unexpected puddles while still looking polished for the office. Because in Accra, even when it's pouring, the corporate girlies still show up looking like the forecast called for fashion. Fashion airline uniforms. Rebranding a product costs a lot of money and is risky, you want to end up with more customers, not less. Sometimes it may be necessary, like when Barclays sold their African activities to Absa Bank. They spent 1 billion Dollars (thousand million) in Africa to make people aware that Barclays was now Absa, and that the customers would get an even better service than before. (hu hu hu), and that included software changes and other internal issues. But you may also rebrand to draw attention to a product. With slogans like “new, better, more”. That’s nice for toothpaste, but how do you rebrand and airline so that you are in the news once again? Take British Airways. They have about 250 planes, to repaint one would cost about 200,000 $, total bill for rebranding is 50 million dollars, that is for the planes alone. Now here’s a clever one, all these people in and around the planes wear a uniform, in a certain colour and a certain style. These uniforms wear out anyway and need to be changed, so rebrand by changing these uniforms. And get a fashion celebrity to dress in it and make a lot of noise about it. And be politically correct, go with the times. The last time that BA changed their style they brought in a gender neutral style, so stewards and captains were free to choose skirts, (the Scottish were already doing that) and the girls were allowed to wear trousers. Though I haven't seen any of their male crews wearing skirts, I think they pulled that one back and left Virgin Airlines to carry that baton, but it did give them a lot of publicity. At that time I wondered if our upcoming BBQ Laws (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer-LGBTQ+) will allow cross dressing anyway. The British Airways collection was designed by British-Ghanaian fashion designer and master tailor, Ozwald Boateng OBE, (born 1967) with the help of more than 1,500 colleagues from across the business who were involved in the end-to-end process, including design workshops, prototype feedback and wearer trials. The fee he charged was not disclosed but formed part of BA's 5 Bn Pounds investment over 5 years, and Ozwald is estimated to earn 10 million $ upwards yearly.

Migraine. A common ailment that is still poorly understood. And the additional bad news is that medication only suppresses it in about 1/3 of the cases. But certain things can be “triggers”, and it may help if you know your triggers so you can try to avoid them. To find out your triggers take note of the following, daily, for the next 2 months, day of week: Monday, Friday etc. Attack? No, if yes, start and end time, pain level 1-10, any prior vision problems, tingling, speech problems? What? Hours slept, sleep time – wake time, Quality: Poor, OK, good. What food, and breakfast, lunch or dinner skipped? Water drunk, 1,2,3 ltr?Coffee, alcohol, chocolate, aged cheese, processed meat (sausage etc), MSG salt, how much? Stress level, 1-10? Work, family, money, other? (all, haha). Exercise, type? Phone Screen time?, Period/flow day? (1-7) weather pressure drop, hot, cold, windy, storm. Medicines taken, dosage, time. It may sound amateuriastic, but after 2 months you’ll hopefully see a pattern.

Market economics for beginners. I have that habit of keeping things. Like the spoons and sometimes forks from take away and delivery foods. Then someone complained that cats were digging up her garden and destroying what she had planted, so I figured that putting forks upside down among her seedlings might keep the cats out. I went into my collection of kept plastic cutlery and got the forks out. 51 of them (2 were wooden). But the interesting part was that there were 20 different types. Ranging from white plastic to transparent to black, some even silver or gold coloured, long and short dents, reinforced handles, decorated handles, 20 different types. To me that means that 20 different companies or people are trying to sell their plastic forks into the market of takeaway and delivery foods. Serious competition there. The lesson is, if you think this market needs something, maybe big size plastic zips for sports wear (I couldn't find any), try to find it and see what you find. Many may already be selling what you are trying to introduce, and you’ll have to fight hard to find your place. Or get stuck with the goods. So before preparing to market, study the market first. Sounds obvious?

The pub at Accra International Airport. That’s when you already have checked in and after immigration and security. I prefer The Pub on the right after check in rather than the one on the left (they are both called Pub), the one on the left has bad memories with me, overcharging and no change. And it is nicely quiet at The Pub. The samosa was nice (45 GHC FOR 3), I ordered a second portion, but the chicken pie didn’t have much chicken in it. Water goes for 10 GHC, club mini at 35 and vodka also 35 a shot. They also sell jollof and waakye at 140-150 GHC.

Lydia...

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The narration goes quiet For a long time there was a voice running under my working day. Not a dramatic one. A logistics voice. After this, export that. Then log into the other place and copy the number. Then paste it, reformat it, move it over.

It never stopped. Even on good days, half my attention was spent narrating the handoffs between tools — the little errands that connect one piece of work to the next. I owned a lot of software and each piece solved a slice of something. The trouble was the gaps. My actual work lived in the seams between subscriptions, in the ferrying nobody designed a tool to do.

What I did this spring This spring I did a plain thing. I took the scattered browser chores — pulling stats off the platforms, gathering the sources I reference, moving a finished piece into its next shape — and handed them to one agent, AllyHub, that just does them, in the browser, across all the places they used to live in separately. It's closer to an all-in-one creator toolkit that runs the errands than another app I have to operate. Several single-purpose tools went unrenewed after that. A few I'd forgotten I paid for.

Setting it up took a couple of evenings, and the first runs came back a little wrong until I corrected them. What surprised me is that the corrections stuck to the work itself — each chore became a one-click route that remembered the fix, so it never starts from scratch and gets a bit cleaner each time I run it. The effort didn't evaporate the way it does when a script breaks. It accumulated.

What actually changed I can't chart any productivity gain from this. The hours saved are modest and I won't pretend otherwise. What actually changed is quieter than a number: the logistics voice mostly stopped. The errands still happen. I just stopped being the one narrating them to myself all day.

That turned out to be the thing I wanted and couldn't name. Not more output. Less narration. A working day with fewer background instructions running, so the foreground has room for the part that was always mine to do.

Fewer tools didn't make me faster in any way I can measure. It made the day quieter, which — measured over a long enough stretch — might be the same thing.

This is where I stand.

This is what I can see from here.

Come and look with me.

False categories, especially those that have acquired moral prestige, institutional protection, and administrative usefulness, are hard to get rid of. “Race” is such a false category when talking about human beings. Not merely is it a morally compromised word inherited from slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow, eugenics, and Nazism; it is a scientifically collapsed and debunked category that nevertheless continues to organize public language as though the collapse had never occurred.

White supremacists and Aryan/Nazi supremacists once built their politics on racial mythology. That much is obvious. But contemporary discourse, including much of what calls itself anti-racist, keeps “race” alive as an organizing concept. It repeats the now-standard disclaimer that race is not biological, then proceeds to speak, classify, moralize, accuse, reward, punish, and administer as though race were the central fact of social existence. This is not liberation from race-thinking. It is race-thinking after race science.

Let us call this what it is: racialism language.

By racialism language I mean the continued use of “race” and racial categories as if they named stable human subdivisions, even when accompanied by the ritual phrase “socially constructed.” It is a language that denies biology in one sentence and restores race as social ontology in the next—unreal in science, real enough for politics, identity, bureaucratic allocation, and institutional control. It is toxic not because it notices discrimination, but because it preserves the classificatory machinery that made racial discrimination possible in the first place.

The scientific point is no longer seriously contestable. Human biological variation exists, but it does not divide humanity into the racial boxes inherited from colonial rule, plantation slavery, segregation, eugenics, and fascist law. Biological anthropologists, geneticists, and the National Academies have repeatedly made the same point: “race” is not a sound proxy for human genetic variation. Human differences exist, but they do not conform to the old racial mythology.

That should have changed public discourse more radically than it did. If a category has no defensible scientific foundation, serious intellectuals should not make it the master noun of social analysis. They may study the history of the category, the harms caused by belief in it, the institutions that imposed it. But they should not continue to treat the category itself as though it were intellectually purified once the adjective “social” is attached to it.

The usual escape hatch is the phrase “race is socially constructed.” This formula has become a kind of passkey. It allows writers, activists, professors, administrators, and consultants to admit that race is not biological while continuing to organize their argument around race. Critical Race Theory uses this move habitually: it says, usually near the beginning, that race is not an objective biological reality but a social construction. Very well. But then what?

Too often, what follows is not the abandonment of race as a category of thought but its resurrection. Race is declared biologically dead and socially immortal. It is rejected as nature but revived as structure; dismissed as genetics but restored as identity; denied as taxonomy but retained as destiny. This is not an intellectual solution. It is category laundering.

Critical Race Theory’s central failure is not that it speaks about discrimination—discrimination must be confronted. Its failure is that it cannot speak about discrimination without preserving race as the master category. Its characteristic move is ontologically evasive and epistemologically disingenuous: first the disclaimer, then the reification. The theory says race is not real in the old biological sense, but then proceeds as if race were real enough to organize knowledge, voice, guilt, innocence, group interest, social standing, institutional legitimacy, and political remedy.

A false ontology does not become sound merely because it is placed in the service of advocacy, nor does political usefulness confer scientific dignity. Witchcraft accusations had real consequences. Heresy trials had real consequences. Caste classifications have real consequences. Jim Crow had real consequences. Nazi racial law had real consequences. But real consequences do not validate the ontology behind them. The fact that institutions can make a falsehood powerful does not make the falsehood true.

That is the missing distinction. “Race” is not real as a human subdivision. Racialization is real as a social process. Racism is real as belief, practice, and institution. Discrimination is real as unequal treatment, exclusion, exploitation, stigma, threat, and humiliation. But “race” itself remains a bad category. A serious theory should study race-making, not race; racialization, not racial identity; discrimination mechanisms, not inherited boxes.

This distinction was drawn, forcefully, well before “woke” entered the political vocabulary and years before DEI became an administrative regime. In 2012, Barbara J. Fields and Karen E. Fields’ Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life showed that race is the product of racism, not its cause—that race exists only in the practice of racial ascription, much as witches exist only in the practice of witch-hunting. The analogy, notably, is the same one used above. The warning was available a decade before the DEI apparatus was built. It went unheeded—or worse, it was absorbed into the very racialism language it had diagnosed.

The woke movement, especially in its university, corporate, philanthropic, and administrative form, ignored this distinction anyway. It took the language of Critical Race Theory, simplified it, moralized it, and bureaucratized it into DEI administration. A legal-academic theory became a compliance regime: training, metrics, hiring language, promotion expectations, diversity statements, speech codes, grievance procedures, ideological surveillance.

The word “woke” has been overused, abused, and weaponized. But the phenomenon it names is real enough: a moral-political style that treats disagreement as harm, skepticism as complicity, speech as violence, institutional neutrality as oppression, and group classification as enlightenment. Wokishness is not simply compassion for the mistreated. It is compassion captured by bad theory, moral vanity, and administrative power. In its DEI form, it often became less a search for fairness than a demand for alignment.

This is why so many DEI regimes produced backlash. Some current efforts to curtail DEI may be debatable in method, scope, or legal theory, but the backlash did not come from nowhere. DEI overreached: it confused moral aspiration with administrative entitlement, replaced inquiry with training, argument with confession, disagreement with accusation, and merit with performative compliance. It made the fight against discrimination look indistinguishable from thought control.

The irony is severe. A movement that claimed to fight discrimination helped normalize new forms of discriminatory sorting. A theory that claimed to expose race as a social construct helped preserve race as the master category of institutional life. A bureaucracy that claimed to foster inclusion often produced suspicion, resentment, silence, and fear—damaging not only the individuals caught in its machinery, but the cause it claimed to serve.

No durable anti-discrimination order can be built on false premises. Good intentions are not enough. The path to hell is often paved not by cruelty alone, but by benevolent ambition joined to bad concepts, little foresight, and the intoxicating belief that one’s own coercion is morally different from everyone else’s.

There is one boundary that must never be crossed: the fight against discrimination must not become a fight against the First Amendment. A free society cannot promise liberty, dignity, and equal citizenship while placing speech, thought, inquiry, and dissent under administrative guardianship. The right to speak freely is not reserved for the enlightened, the credentialed, the fashionable, or the morally approved. It belongs also to the mistaken, the clumsy, the offensive, and the unenlightened. That is not a defect of the First Amendment. It is its point.

This is the hard discipline of freedom. In a free society we must tolerate that some of our brothers and sisters are wrong, prejudiced, crude, historically ignorant, or morally behind the curve. We may answer them, refute their premises, and expose their errors—but we may not strip them of expressive rights merely because their speech is unwelcome or insufficiently enlightened. Fighting discrimination is difficult by design: it requires distinguishing discriminatory conduct, which may properly be prohibited, from offensive opinion, which must remain protected, and it requires institutions to punish harassment, threats, and unequal treatment when proven while refusing to police lawful belief, dissent, or tone.

That tension between dignity and liberty cannot be abolished without abolishing liberty itself. A society serious about human dignity must oppose discrimination; a society serious about freedom must protect the right of people to say things that are wrong, crude, offensive, or unfashionable. The two commitments will rub against each other. They must be managed, not resolved.

The last thing to be surrendered in the struggle against discrimination is the First Amendment. Once speech is placed under ideological supervision, every cause can become an orthodoxy, every orthodoxy an accusation system, and every accusation system a machinery of fear. That is not justice. It is liberalism committing suicide in the language of virtue. The First Amendment is not a luxury to be enjoyed after moral consensus has been achieved; it is the condition that allows a plural society to live without enforced consensus.

The problem becomes even clearer when one considers the departmentalization of discrimination. Contemporary discourse tends to carve human injury into separate administrative silos: race, sex, gender, sexuality, religion, disability, age, caste, class, nationality, ethnicity, language, and so forth. Each silo develops its own vocabulary, moral hierarchy, academic literature, advocacy apparatus, bureaucratic constituency, and preferred rituals of accusation. Intersectionality tries to reconnect the silos, but often does so merely by multiplying categories rather than by questioning the deeper logic of categorization itself.

A friend once posed the matter with a joke that is more philosophically serious than it first appears: which discrimination should one focus on if the person in question is a lesbian, Jewish, dark-skinned woman of older age? The answer should be: all of the above. And if the answer is all of the above, the theory must be general enough to explain all of the above.

That is why we need a General Theory of Discrimination—one that abandons the inherited racial boxes to study the universal mechanisms by which human beings convert perceived difference into unequal treatment: categorization, essentialization, boundary-making, hierarchy, opportunity hoarding, scapegoating, exclusion, institutionalization, and moral rationalization.

History supplies the justification, not merely the illustration. The gravest catastrophes of modernity did not arise from private prejudice; they arose when false categories were codified into law. Jim Crow did not simply dislike Black Americans—it classified, separated, subordinated, and policed them. Nazi racial law did not merely hate Jews—it defined them, registered them, excluded them, and helped prepare their destruction; its architects studied American anti-miscegenation and citizenship law directly when drafting the Nuremberg statutes. Real-world consequences do not validate a false ontology. They are evidence of what a false ontology can do once it acquires the force of law—which is exactly why a general theory, and not a racial one, is needed to guard against its recurrence.

The lesson is not that contemporary DEI is Nazism. That would be absurd. The lesson is more basic and more urgent: beware of any politics that makes inherited or assigned group categories central to moral and civic life. Beware of any regime that classifies persons first and judges them second. Beware of any language that claims to overcome discrimination while preserving the categories by which discrimination learned to speak.

Such a theory would also be more humane. It would return the individual to the center of moral attention without denying institutional patterns. It would recognize that discrimination can be personal or systemic, intentional or unintentional, legal or informal, violent or polite, direct or hidden. It would understand that human beings can be harmed under many descriptions and that no single category has a monopoly on suffering. It would make room for history without imprisoning persons inside inherited taxonomies.

Above all, a General Theory of Discrimination would refuse the moral laziness of racialism language. It would not say “race explains.” It would ask what precisely explains: phenotype, ancestry, class, geography, law, culture, religion, language, migration history, schooling, wealth, family structure, policing, neighborhood, credentialing, stereotype, or institutional rule. It would insist on conceptual precision, because sloppy categories are not harmless. They become forms, rubrics, trainings, accusations, exclusions, and punishments.

The better path is harder. It demands patience, precision, and courage. It requires us to fight discrimination without reifying false categories, to remember history without being governed by its worst language, and to protect vulnerable persons without infantilizing them. Enduring that discipline is a mark of a functioning constitutional order, not a concession to those who abuse its freedoms.

We should retire racialism language. We should study race-making without speaking as if races exist. We should confront racism without reifying race. We should fight antisemitism, anti-Black discrimination, anti-Asian discrimination, anti-Muslim discrimination, misogyny, homophobia, ageism, caste prejudice, disability discrimination, class contempt, and every other form of unjust exclusion under one larger moral and analytical frame.

The goal is not silence about discrimination. The goal is clarity. The goal is not color-blind indifference. The goal is category-conscious deconstruction without category worship. A civilized society should not need racial mythology to fight injustice. It should need courage, evidence, fairness, law, memory, mercy, free speech, and truth.

And truth begins here: race is not a human reality. It is a human error with a terrible history. We should stop rebuilding our institutions around it.