- Author
- jyn
- Published
- 14 July 2025
- Kind
- Personal blog essay, argument with examples
- Original
- jyn.dev/you-are-in-a-box/
- Subject
- Future of computing
What it is
jyn writes a personal site on computing. The post asks why tools grow until they stagnate. It reviews how programs talk to each other and the limits of each.
What it says
- jyn says tools promise to do anything if you switch to them. Switching costs then push them to grow until they stagnate.
- jyn names two escapes: cap tool growth, or lower switching costs through interoperation.
- jyn says backward compatibility and standards lower switching costs. Standards need the tool's cooperation, as the undocumented CUDA binary format shows.
- jyn says FFI is hard because languages meet only at the C ABI. Each program also needs hand-written bindings.
- jyn praises Unix pipes for letting programs in any language compose. The data is unstructured and flows one way.
- jyn calls PowerShell and nushell a major shell innovation. They cannot interoperate, and programs have no shared schema.
- jyn concludes that programs are a prison. Data is trapped inside, and users depend on the program author.
What evidence it gives
The post uses one worked shell pipeline and named tools as examples. It lists a bibliography of about twenty sources. It offers argument rather than measurement.
Interests and limits
The post is part one and says the way out comes next. The claims about switching costs rest on the author's reasoning.