Redshifted

I have a friend who used to explain things.

Blog posts, long answers to short questions, commit messages you could learn from. If you worked near him you got smarter, almost passively, the way you get tan. He's still working. He ships more than ever. But the explanations stopped — not out of unkindness, and not because he has nothing to say. His output just doesn't come in a form I can read anymore: repositories of agent configurations, pipelines that assemble themselves, prose written half for machines. He didn't go quiet. He went somewhere my eyes don't work.

I've started calling this redshifting.

The astronomy is worth getting right, because the metaphor is more precise than it first sounds. The redshift I mean is the cosmological kind: not an object speeding through space, but the space between you and it expanding as the universe grows — and that expansion stretches the light crossing it toward longer wavelengths and lower frequencies. A distant galaxy may still be emitting, but the light it emitted can reach us dimmer or shifted out of the visible band. At sufficient redshift, emitted visible wavelengths arrive in the infrared or other bands, where instruments may detect them. The source has not necessarily stopped shining. Its signal may simply be outside the band your eyes can read from where you stand.

That is exactly what AI acceleration is doing to people. The most accelerated among us haven't left; they're right there on the payroll, in the group chat, at the meetup. They still emit — more than ever, actually. But their working notes are prompts, their essays are systems, their conversation partners are agents, and the trail they leave is stretched so far out of the human-readable spectrum that from behind, it reads as silence. We talk about these people the way you'd talk about the raptured. He used to write. She used to teach. They used to be here. They are still here. We just can't see their light.

I should be honest about where I am in this. I'm median redshifted. From behind me — from a friend who hasn't touched any of this yet — I look half gone: I talk to my tools, my day compiles into artifacts I'd struggle to walk anyone through, and I've caught people describing my work week in the past tense. From ahead of me, I look like I'm standing still. There are people whose velocity I genuinely cannot parse anymore, whose output arrives from somewhere past my red edge. Everyone in this industry right now is somebody's raptured colleague and somebody's left-behind friend, both at once, and yes, I hear how absurd the rapture language is. I'm keeping it anyway, because it's the only register that matches the feeling.

You can watch both ends of this in public. Yacine posts constantly — an automated AI podcast, a stream of public software — from somewhere out past most people's red edge, and the volume doesn't make the signal easier to parse. The light arrives; it arrives stretched. Simon Willison is the counter-example: he writes extensively about experiments and collects practical discoveries as TILs. That public record makes the work readable and followable for people a step behind him, at least in my reading; I'm describing the effect, not claiming a stated intent. One of them shows that emission isn't legibility. The other shows that staying legible at speed is a choice.

Here's why this matters beyond the ache of it. Culture transmits through legible exhaust. Every generation of makers learned from the visible trail of the people slightly ahead: the blog post that explained the bug, the README that admitted the design mistake, the answer written for a stranger, the wiki page anyone could edit. That trail was never anybody's job. It was a byproduct of moving at a speed where your traces stayed in the visible band. Acceleration eats the byproduct. The faster you recede, the more your exhaust shifts out of range — and the commons that taught all of us starts to starve, not from selfishness, but from velocity.

There are two obvious responses, and they're both wrong. You can't ask the accelerated to slow down; they won't, and they shouldn't have to — the frontier is genuinely wonderful and I understand why people run toward it. And you can't tell everyone else to just speed up; that's not an answer, that's the arms race restated as advice.

But there's a third option, and it's the one this whole company is built on: you can choose to emit at wavelengths that stay visible.

Portland has a precedent for this move. Ward Cunningham created the WikiWikiWeb for the Portland Pattern Repository: a surface so simple that any practitioner could add and edit each other's pages, and the shared knowledge stayed in everyone's visible band. The way I read that move: the fix for illegibility wasn't deceleration. It was a medium.

That's what Vibes DIY is for me. A vibe — an app you made by describing it, live at a link, that anyone can open and remix — is exhaust in the visible spectrum. It's not a demo of what I can do that you can't. It's a trace with a door in it: press Remix, change one thing, and now it's yours, and your version is a trace for the next person. The transmission that used to ride on blog posts and wiki edits can ride on working software now, because making the software finally takes less time than writing the post about it did.

I'm at the age and the point in my career where the expected move is to recede gracefully — take the acceleration, enjoy the view from out past the red edge, let the light stretch. A lot of people I admire are making that move right now, and I don't blame a single one of them.

Instead of leaving, I'm giving back with Vibes.