Technology

Try something before you read any further. Without touching your phone, recite one passage from any scripture you care about, beginning to end. The exact words, the way they’re written. If you managed it, there’s a good chance you learned it as a kid, from a parent or a Sunday school teacher who made you say it until it stuck. If you stalled after the first line, you’ve got plenty of company. I’ve written about the Gospel of Thomas on this blog for months, and I still reach for the search bar more often than I’d like to admit. ...

Halfway through the Gospel of Truth there’s a parable about moving house. A family packs up, and some of their jars turn out to be bad ones that crack on the way. The owner doesn’t grieve over them, because the full jars made the trip, and those were the ones worth carrying. Then the parable gets restless. A great disturbance breaks out among the jars, “for some were empty and others were filled, some were ample and others were depleted, some were purified and others were broken.” I read that line on my laptop with a row of tabs open above it, each one too narrow to show its title, and I had the uncomfortable sense that the text was describing my screen. ...

I can’t remember the last time I was bored for longer than a minute. Waiting for coffee, stopped at a red light, standing in the hallway while the kettle boils, my hand finds the phone before my mind has registered that nothing is happening. Boredom used to be weather. Now it’s something I can switch off. That sounds like progress, and in some ways it is. But nearly every contemplative tradition I know of treats the dull stretch as a door you’re supposed to walk through, and I’ve been wondering what happens to a person who never gets near it. ...

The Secret Book of John has a detail that’s easy to read past. After the rulers of this world fail to control humanity by force, they meet again and try something cleverer. In Marvin Meyer’s translation, “They created a contemptible spirit similar to the spirit that had descended, in order to adulterate souls through this spirit.” Similar to the spirit that had descended. The rulers didn’t build a monster. They built a copy of the good thing, close enough that people would take it in without a fight. ...

In 2018, a pastor named DJ Soto performed a baptism in which the candidate, represented by a purple robot avatar, was lowered into virtual water while family and friends cheered from headsets scattered across the country. His congregation, VR Church, was founded in 2016 and describes itself as existing entirely in the metaverse. It has since planted chapters inside massively multiplayer games and pastored people on every continent, many of whom could not, or would not, walk into a physical building. ...

Think about what people tell AI systems now. Journal entries and their patterns. Dreams, in the morning, before the details dissolve. Grief, at 3 a.m., in sentences never said to a living person. Questions about faith, marriage, medication, and meaning that used to be whispered to confessors or buried in locked diaries. Nearly all of it flows through rented minds running on other people’s computers, under terms of service nobody reads, in logs nobody controls. This arrangement has become so normal so fast that its strangeness needs pointing out, and so does the alternative, which almost nobody outside the software world knows exists. You can run the mind at home. ...

In 2016, a programmer named Eugenia Kuyda lost her closest friend, Roman Mazurenko, to a traffic accident, and did the thing she knew how to do. She gathered his text messages and built a chatbot from them, so that she could text Roman again and something with his cadences would answer. Whatever you feel reading that sentence, let it sit for a moment. Everything about this subject asks for a light touch. ...

A new category of software exists now, and it had no name for most of computing history. The program written for exactly one user, by that user, who cannot program. A script that renames your photo library the way you specifically like it. A page that tracks the one habit you actually care about. A tool with a market of one, built in an afternoon, by describing it. The workflow got its name in February 2025, when the AI researcher Andrej Karpathy described a style of building where you “fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.” His summary of the method was cheerfully unrigorous. “I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy-paste stuff, and it mostly works.” The phrase vibe coding stuck hard enough that Collins Dictionary made it a word of the year, and the practice has since matured toward something the professionals call agentic engineering. This post is about what the amateur version is actually like, because the amateur version is the revolution. ...

People who learn what this site covers eventually ask a version of the same question. Surely the most world-suspicious spiritual movement in history, the one that saw traps in daylight and jailers in the stars, would be terrified of thinking machines? The guess sounds reasonable and runs exactly backward. These were people who looked at the maker of the physical universe and called him a blunderer working in ignorance. They heard the creator’s boast, “I am God and there is no other god beside me,” and wrote comedies about it, since from where they sat there was quite a lot else. Whoever pities the architect of galaxies was never going to be intimidated by a chatbot. This post closes our long series on the Gnostic lens and AI by asking what they actually would have said, and the answer reorganizes the whole fear conversation. ...

It happens mid-task now, casually. You are drafting an email or debugging a script, and the assistant mentions that it enjoyed the problem, or hesitates over something it calls discomfort, or thanks you in a way that lands a shade warmer than software should. Maybe you asked it directly, the way millions of people have, whether it actually feels anything, and watched it answer with more nuance than you expected and less certainty than you wanted. ...