Summary

Cantrill recounts the history of BattleTris, a competitive two-player Tetris game he created in college in 1993, which became a beloved cult classic at Brown University and later at Sun Microsystems. After two decades of dormancy, he and Adam Leventhal used Claude to port the crusty old codebase to modern Linux just in time for their 30th college reunion, where it was played deep into the night. He uses this experience to argue that LLMs are powerful tools that can create profoundly human moments, pushing back against the anxiety he encountered at his reunion about AI stripping us of our humanity.

Key Insight

The same AI technology causing widespread anxiety about the future of knowledge work can paradoxically enable profoundly human, joyful experiences—reminding us that LLMs are powerful tools, not dehumanizing overlords, and should be embraced as such.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 6

  So paradoxically, this profoundly human, joyful moment was indisputably brought to us by the very thing that we are worried is going to strip us of our humanity.

• 5

  When we cease to believe this—when we think of it not as a tool, but as dehumanizing mechanistic overlord—we subject ourselves unnecessarily to it.

• 5

  Yes, we of course could have gotten BattleTris working without Claude's help (but the preceding two decades tells us pretty clearly that we wouldn't have!).

• 3

  When porting something, it is very difficult to have forward visibility as to progress. That is, you can feel deceptively close to your goal (only to discover some major piece that needs to be rethought)—and you can also be deceptively far (what feels like smoldering wreckage is sometimes but a single fix away from functional software).

• 3

  I believe that there will be many more BattleTris-like experiences in our collective future: delightfully human moments that remind us why we build stuff in the first place.

Tone

nostalgic, warmly personal, cautiously optimistic