Second Order Stupid Plot
There’s a horror movie trope where the hapless sheeple keep going further into a maze, a dark spooky building, a black forest, a cave, whatever. You know, the kind of place no human with an intellect of potato salad or better would EVER “just keep going” further into. I suppose that’s what Horror Movies are for: Kill off all the pinheads less intelligent than anchovies.
That’s what irritates me in nearly all “The Backrooms” videos on YouTube. I swear you can’t get more than a few minutes into one before you get hit with some abrupt act of total idiocy. Its usually a whole group of these Velveeta yellow hazmat clowns: “Oh, hey look – the bloody trail of charred dismembered body parts goes this way into this unmapped unlit area where I’m hearing scary sounds and I think I saw a creepy thing move – Let’s keep Going In FURTHER“… EVERY. DAMNED. TIME. I ditch the video right there. I can’t this. I just can’t. How can you be a SCIENTIST working at that goddamn secret government outfit for more than a minute without being told “Yo, Cheese-Man – about 20 of us have already been KILLED in there, so just sayin’…”
Google this: “Stupid Plot”. Then “Second Order Stupid Plot”. The movie thing I’m talking about – that’s what that is. It has a name. Then AI started making companies get WEIRD. Beyond weird, actually. I call it ‘Dystopian Stupidity’ – that uncanny place where Stupid and Crazy make a malformed flipper baby. When Tech Leaders started with the ‘Token-Maxxing’ nonsense – I sprayed milk out my nose laughing. But then I saw what the WORKERS were doing to themselves, and letting be done to them. I stopped laughing. Now I gotta say something. Put. The. Baby. Down… Step away from the flipper baby.
Vibe Code Truly Is The Backrooms
There is a fascinating plot device in The Backrooms: The void-filling, where ‘The CONSTRUCT’ of The Backrooms spontaneously materializes new structure into VOID space. It’s akin to how observation collapses quantum superposition states into “One Actually Observed Result”. Simply stated: “Its Only When You LOOK at it That it Becomes Real”.
It seems in The Backrooms – when a human merely observes a VOID space a first time the ‘superpositioned indeterminate state potential’ of The Backrooms becomes self-aware it has been observed and starts to ‘collapse’ the indeterminacy. And then you see The Backrooms spontaneously generating new construction into the observed void. The observer initiates VOID Fill with a tiny influence – then a hurricane of construction is unleashed that clearly “Wasn’t All You”. That is a REALLY COOL plot device. And it is an absolute HORROR SHOW that Generative AI does the SAME DAMN THING to YOUR code!
Think it through, Sherlock. You ask the LLM for a Python Script to ‘clean up your CSV File’ or whatever. You start with a ‘CSV Broom’ to put in a ‘CSV Cleaning Closet’. The LLM starts Filling The VOID that you must intentionally constrain from sprawling to become an industrial campus. Most of you put on your yellow hazmat suit and venture into ALL that New CONSTRUCT. At least you did at first. How long did it take until you ‘adapted’ to barely exploring it at all? Yeah, thought so. You likely thought when you read the subtitle of this section ‘Vibe Code’!? What!? I’m not a VIBE Coder! They’re non-programmer NOOBS who aren’t even technical! They just hand it all over to the LLM! If you think that, maybe you’re not paying attention: The MOMENT you Stop Reading The Code – YOU are Vibe Coding. Full Stop.
It can get BIG in there. You don’t appreciate how enormous ten-thousand lines of code can feel until the
new code expresses methods, classes, rooms, bridges, buildings, whole cities… None that you wrote yourself.
None that was thought the way you think. How carefully “Did You Map it Out”? You know what I’m saying:
There are whole areas across multiple levels you never surveyed. Still you ask the LLM to GENERATE MORE.
You ask the AI to change “one little thing”. You soon realize the LLM seems to have its own agenda.
You witness the geometry of the thing shifting. Subtle changes in structure – usually NOT noticed when it
deviated, but much later when something BREAKS. You learn the question ‘What was it BEFORE?’ has a vicious
twin: ‘WHEN was it before!?’ You never MAPPED it… You did NOT carefully READ and UNDERSTAND every line.
This place is geometrically and morphologically unstable – and its growing.
Oh, and by the way Cheese-Man: Countless of you have been killed in there already, so just sayin’…
The Opacity Trap
I chose Python as the language for this article – not because its ubiquitous. I mentioned Python because its foundational tenet was to be READABLE and COMPREHENSIBLE. I used Python: “The Easiest Language to READ” – to land a point I call “The Opacity Trap”.
I chose Python because I need you to comprehend how massive this problem is. When Generative AI can spawn ‘Backrooms’ into your own code that pushes YOU out of it – You gotta step back and look up. This is BIG. Since LLMs started slinging code – there has been produced a volume of ‘Code Backrooms’ that may never be fully surveyed by folks who need to ensure it doesn’t break. But when it breaks… its TOO BIG. You KNOW there’s not enough time to ‘Send in the Hazmat Cheese-Men’: That won’t work any more. Somewhere along the way – you crossed a threshold. There was a moment “The Lights Went Out” in your own code. Wait… I heard a scary noise. I think I saw a creepy thing move…
Do you see the Vicious Loop you set in motion!? When You Lose Visibility into Your Own Code – You Feel Forced to HAND IT BACK to the AI To FIX IT – Making it Increasingly LESS Visible!
THAT is the OPACITY TRAP.
Python is NOT obscure – it reads really clean. But you let the AI spawn a ‘CONSTRUCT’ that now your organization depends on, and not even the ‘cleanest reading language’ is immune to the LIGHTS OUT problem that expresses when nobody truly knows that code. For you Management Younglings – this is REAL Platform Risk. Get caught up on the reading – STAT. You bumbling around blindly in cultures of eyes wide shut is the heart of this nonsense. YOU let this happen. YOU did this. YOU should have pushed back at the “AI-Juiced Ship More Faster” childishness. This was a leadership failure. There is a frightening revelation in this Age of AI that huge swaths of leadership truly have no clue what they’re doing – which is unironically also a part of this OPACITY TRAP.
