The Forgotten Bits

In this AI-powered age, the tools are dazzling. Code writes itself. Systems configure themselves. Everything is faster, easier, more accessible. And that’s a win—for most. Now, more people than ever can build more things and ship them sooner. That’s democratic. That’s powerful.

But there’s a cost. Surgeons don’t learn by turning their backs on patients and browsing web pages. They learn by reaching in—by touching what they do—so they know where to go when something breaks. Similarly, if you're training to be a software engineer (or working at the edge of research) you can’t just drive the car. You need to know what’s under the hood.

My students struggle with this, all the time.

  • They’ve never configured a system from scratch.
  • They can’t trace a bug through layers of automation.
  • They’re drifting—out of the creative loop, out of the technical conversation.
  • They're forgetting how to touch the machine.

That’s why this book exists. To bring back the foundations. To train people who not only use tools, but understand them. Science and engineering demand that kind of contact for reproducibility, transparency, accountability. You can’t debug a black box. You can’t verify results you don’t understand. You can’t improve what you’ve never seen inside.

AI tools are brilliant at hiding the mess. But to build trustworthy systems—or critique and improve them—we need people who still know how to see the mess, step through it, and make sense of it. As Donald Knuth once put it:

"Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study. The transfer of information from the bottom to the top is what I do for a living."

That’s the spirit behind this book.

It’s not anti-AI. It’s pro-agency, pro-curiosity, pro-understanding.
It’s about staying connected to the craft, even as the tools get slicker.
Let’s not forget how to touch the machine.