i walk onto the itp-floor.

#1 shows off their brand new 'vibe-coded' tool to #2. #2 nods on, and walks back to the big monitor where claude-code is certain that the version of their stepper-motor library is incorrect. i'm curious, because that library seems to work for everyone else. with my bag still on, i look at their breadboard. ah, their clock wire is off by one. i tell them, smile & receive their gratitude, and walk on by as they redirect claude-code to more elaborate ambitions; now that the stepper-motor is working.

as i keep my bag on the table, #3 walks up to me. they show me a website on their laptop — an archive of their life's work — that they 'cooked-up' last night with codex. i notice that two items on the header lead to the same page. as i gather up the energy to involve them in a design-discussion, i notice that they've pulled up a chair besides me, and are on another codex window, vehemently typing instructions for it to build them a custom-library for an led-matrix. you see — it is important for #3 to produce many things in a day, otherwise their anxiety shoots through the roof. they need to be 'productive'; comments on little things that still work — such as design-decisions — are merely impediments.

i silently open my laptop.

#4 has just texted me about cancelling the lunch that they were supposed to buy me tomorrow, in return for teaching them a little bit of html & css before. the deadline for the website that they wanted to make is too close, and using chat-gpt would just be faster. they're a grad-student, i wonder, in a program designed to get messy with the underpinnings of common-technology. but, perhaps, html & css just aren't as important.

my laptop-screen boots up to an iterm window, with a long glsl script written to emulate a beam of light reflecting & refracting along the walls of a letterform. as i begin to remember the trigonometric progress that #5 & i made yesterday, just to get the bouncing-angles right, #3 excitedly shows me their acceptance to two prestigious conferences in europe, with papers that they got qwen-3 to write in a few minutes. they walk away looking at flights; it is finally just me, my computer, and computational-curiosity.

i bike back home in the night, still immersed in the many mathematical complexities that reflecting light-particles can bring. i didn't produce anything today.

the sketch will take me, perhaps, two more whole days to get just right. maybe another to crack the presentation. people from one tiny community-run-conference in the middle of philadelphia will invite me to speak about it, and this work will have an audience of a handful of people.

#1, in the meantime, has 'vibe-coded' 6 new interfaces for music-controllers, #2 has arranged 70 stepper-motors in a giant, elaborate installation with fancy new short-throw projectors, #3 has, of-course, built a complex technical system, and #4 is now a famous content creator on tik-tok.

as i wearily collapse into the softness of my bed, my brain takes me back to 2023 — when all i wanted to do with my day was be uninterruptedly invested in computational & poetic curiosity.

absorbing that realization, i sleep — succumbing to the race for 'greatness' — and waking up knowing that i'm going to spend most of today pursuing this thing that i so deeply cherish.

#1, #2, #3 & #4, the masses are yours.

abstracted from real events at itp & the recurse-center in the summer of 2026. written as a formalization of this original piece of thought.