The Administration of the Forest: Notes on the Neo-Stagnation
Look around your slack channels. We are trapped in a corporate revival of late stage Soviet stagnation, and everyone is just pretending this tragic comedy makes sense.
I am a software engineer, but I do not actually get to write any software. My real job is making documents. I just finished reading 'The Snail on the Slope' where bureaucrats drink endless lakes of buttermilk while trying to destroy a Forest they do not understand. Our corporate campus is that building. We entered a bleak era where the rules are absolute, goals are unquestioned, and absolutely nobody believes in the machine we are building.
There is an old Soviet story about a nail factory. The state set the quota by weight, so the workers made a single, useless, five ton nail to check the box. We make that five ton nail several times a month.
Our version of the nail is the Monthly/Weekly/Quarterly Tech/Business Review. We do not write these documents because human writing is considered inefficient. Management mandates that we use generative AI tools to build them. We feed a prompt into the machine, and it instantly vomits ten thousand words of automated noise about cross functional synergy. Then the holy ritual begins. We review the AI text to prepare for the pre-review of the actual review.
When the day of the review arrives, our "leaders" join the Zoom call. These are people whose entire existence depends on the bureaucracy. They do not yell, they use quiet weaponized corporate language designed to make everyone feel inadequate.
They read the document, they calmly state that our AI generated paragraphs show we are not Customer Obsessed enough. They claim the prompt we gave the Kiro lacked Ownership. They look at a chart showing a failed deployment and softly declare that we failed to Dive Deep. They want us to circle back to a metric that does not exist and deliver a chart that measures the velocity of our alignment.
We are just organic carbon components trapped in a closed loop where computers talk to computers to appease the fragile ego of executives.
The AI helps us sprint faster on a treadmill that is not plugged into the wall. The volume of digital smoke doubles every quarter and the box is checked. We produce the five ton nail faster than ever, for the exact same price. We are the chugging the buttermilk staring out the window at a world we no longer understand praying that the machine keeps humming so we can collect our stock vesting.