Coding Machines

by Lawrence Kesteloot

A bug in a programmer’s computer program leads him and his co-workers through an investigation down the stack to a frightening realisation about trust and reality.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction

38 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 1, 2017

Reviews

[Divyanshu Maithani · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant coding / sci-fi suspense thriller!

[Bejoy Mathew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Goosebumps. Probably the best sci-fi short story I have ever read (although it requires some programming literacy to fully understand the story).

[Joc · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is an amusing and fresh story idea. And the suspense was gripping. I think all programmers would agree. Sadly, the plot was simply impossible. As any honest AI expert would tell you, a machine can only be as intelligent as its designer. It may be much faster, more accurate, more precise, and so on. But not more intelligent. More precisely, any human logician that has perfect memory and can think a million thoughts per second would far outstrip any AI that we can build so far. At the same time, any AI that can reach that level would use logical reasoning and definitely would not have behaviour anything like that of the coding machines in this story. Furthermore, mindless evolution of machines would necessarily pass through extremely conspicuous stages contrary to the setting of this story. But, yes, it was still quite entertaining!

[sna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read the pdf version of this book, which is only 30 Letter pages long. Kinda feel bad counting this towards my yearly goal -- but only kind of.

Interesting short story about complier bugs and where they might originate. Spooky to a certain degree.

Main character seems like your run of the mill tech bro. Spending hours debugging issues, staying late at work, not eating at all during these sessions. At one point though, he is aching to start eating to avoid talking politics. 😂

Found it kinda funny how the author uses an explanatory comma when introducing Wireshark but not any other technical terms like switch, linker, compiler.

[Abdelrahman Nasr · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a malware analyst and having an interest in all the low-level world I find this so entertaining!! It also made me think how far malicious code could go in the future!

[Aakash Bajaj · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolute thriller

[Deepak Kar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best thriller for anyone who writes software.

[Leo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most Goodreads users seem to score very generously, giving 5 stars to every story they like, and 2 stars as a scathing pan. I don't: the tooltips define a rubric, might as well follow it.

So when I first rated _Coding Machines_, I gave it 4 stars: It's a great story, I really liked it! The ending is a bit goofy, but who cares? The real meat is the chase, the slow thrilling triangulation of a mystery.

I've also had the excellent fortune to find the story by reading through Kesteloot's website, where it's a bare link among titles like "Ten Reasons Why I Don't Like Golang". So at first, I thought it was a non-fiction debugging war story. Ken Thompson's famous prank escaping into the wild is plausible enough and chilling enough to draw me in, and my incredulity rose with the characters'.

After my fourth or fifth read, I've come to realise that it's more than a great story. It's wormed its way into my mind (obvious analogy is obvious). It has so much to say about trust and corruption, in machines, systems, people. About hammering out a pocket of trust as your threat model grows world-sized, and what that does to your mind, and how it's doomed either way. About writing a truly technical story, where the work is the point rather than a background detail. (Yes I'm still salty about _Going Postal_ not specifying the clacks protocol.)