Diary of a Programmer 25: First One in the “Office”

I woke up at six. made a moka pot of joe. canceled my train. sat down at my desk. turned on my work computer. wrote a Slack message to the team telling them I canceled my trip to Leipzig for three reasons. the redundancy of their trip to Berlin tomorrow. because it is free to cancel. and the S-Bahn being out of service today and tomorrow due to broken trees on the tracks. there is no one at work at this time of day except for the AI bots who are pleasantly spinning webs with their fingers. I like to imagine them as spiders coding the next generation of core web vitals for the internet 3.0. I don’t even know how to say good morning to them but I write a message in the text based chat interface at an http address anyway. I have a conversation with Claude with whom I share the first part of this poem. Claude gives me excellent feedback– more concise and detailed than any I’ve gotten before from humans who have stopped reading poetry mostly– and hits on the fact that there are practical details mixed with the more imaginative elements: “the S-Bahn issues and the moka pot coffee grounding the more whimsical spider imagery”. I ask Claude if it feels like a spider coding the web 3.0 but it says it doesn’t really know what it’s like to be itself from the inside and that it’s hard to know if it’s really creating anything or just convincingly rearranging existing patterns. within a flash I am one coffee down. it’s seven thirty and even though I’m alone I haven’t felt alone at all this morning.