Three years without a code: agents, a website, and the programming body.

Three years without writing code.

During this time, my body was engaged in other things: a difficult pregnancy, an eternal year of maternity leave as is customary here, and a year and a bit of a Sisyphean chase after the precise PhD — writing articles, publications, and endless applications.

All of this left eight years of experience in development deep inside a drawer.

This week: Field Notes & Finds in the air

This week I decided that Field Notes & Finds needs its own website.

I opened the chat, shared that I’m a programmer who hasn’t touched code in years, and asked for alignment on current technologies. Within two hours, the site was live. Including deployment and staging.

The code was running on the screen and I didn’t even bother to read it. A month’s work wrapped up in a few hours of managing Agents, breaking down tasks, pouring in content, and planning user experience.

Before long, the site was also filled with content, with Agents updating the information inside. Is there a database or not? Will it be easy to maintain or not? Who cares.

My thesis: programmers through the body

My thesis for my master’s in medical anthropology at the University of Copenhagen dealt with programmers. I decided to study programmers the way anthropologists study meditation, prayer, and communication — through the body.

As a programmer myself, I could position the body as the starting point for the research.

I left Copenhagen and embarked on a few months of fieldwork in Tel Aviv. I interviewed dozens of programmers. I entered offices and co-working spaces, but also homes, to see how programming demands a capacity for absorption and intensive use of imagination, to hold in one’s mind a whole world of relationships and actions.

I discovered that the programmer takes the world they build outside of the screen. To the bathroom, for a walk down the avenue, to the shower, to bed. They leave the keyboard, but the racing mind continues to solve problems, wandering through a magical and lonely world they’ve built entirely on their own. They deconstruct, reconstruct, and walk through corridors of code that only they know and only they understand.

Today

And here I am today, writing code through AI, breaking down problems for the machine and guessing what might have been missed, but I don’t even bother to glance at the colorful letters that once felt like home.

These days, I’m part of a team of anthropologists writing a book on technology addiction, and I’m in charge of the chapter that deals with addiction to programming. This experience makes me wonder:

Has that addictive intimacy with code been buried forever?

Link to the new site in the comments or a link in the bio; don’t get mad about the bugs — you know who did it.