Do We Need Doomsday Programmers?
We thought our systems were unbreakable. Then a virus, a tremor, a fiber cut and suddenly they weren't.
COVID-19 didn't just kill people. It exposed how fragile everything we built on top of "normal" really was. Supply chains collapsed. Remote infrastructure buckled. The assumptions we coded into our systems, about uptime, about travel, about physical presence, fell apart one by one.
I live in a small town in Turkey. Any earthquke above 4.0 on the Richter scale takes down the GSM network. Four point zero. That's not a catastrophe, that's a Tuesday in a seismic zone. And yet: no signal, no API calls, no cloud IDE, no Stack Overflow.
GitHub has a code repository in the Arctic, buried in a vault in Svalbard. They're preserving the world's open source software for a civilizational collapse scenario. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault does the same for crop seeds. Smart people are thinking about what survives a doomsday. Someone is preserving the code. Someone is preserving the seeds.
Nobody is preserving the programmer.
In America, a non-trivial number of people build private bunkers. Most of us think they're paranoid. But I spent three days last week without internet on my computer and I discovered I could barely function. Every time I pressed F1, it tried to open an online doc. Every time I reached for autocomplete, it waited for a model that wasn't there.
I thought about QBasic. QBasic had a built-in help system. You pressed F1 and the answer was just there, local, instant, complete. The environment was self-contained. You didn't need the world to be working to write code. The whole thing fit on a floppy disk and it knew things.
Three days in, I caught myself staring at a blank editor. Not because I didn't know what to build. Because I didn't know where to start without the scaffolding I'd grown used to. No autocomplete. No instant documentaiton. No "just ask Claude." I opened a file, wrote a function signature, and froze. The muscle was there. The confidence wasn't.