In 1492, a German monk wrote a book arguing against the printing press.
His point: copying manuscripts by hand was spiritual. It built discipline. The printing press would make monks lazy and rot their minds.
To make sure anyone read it, he had to print it.
I keep thinking about that monk when I read Hacker News.
The technical critiques aren't wrong. AI code hallucinates. Debugging it sucks. Fair points.
But there's something else going on.
‘Vibe coding’ is a slur now. It means using AI to build things without really understanding them. The new ‘script kiddie’.
The message: if you didn't suffer through the syntax, it doesn't count.
That's not quality control. That's protecting an identity.
When a skill you spent years on becomes cheap, you don't just lose money. You lose meaning. So you redraw what ‘real’ means to make sure you're still inside it.
The monk wasn't defending manuscripts. He was defending his sense that his work mattered.
I do this too.
Founder I know exited last year. Acqui-hire. Big number. Became a billionaire.
My first reaction: luck. Right time, right hype cycle. They raised VC, burned cash, got bought anyway.
I didn't know their story. Their hours. Nothing. I just knew they did it different than me.
That's what gave it away.
I've built my whole thing on ‘bootstrap, no VC, the hard way.’ If someone wins without my constraints, what were the constraints for?
So I called it luck. Same move as the monk.
There's another thing I catch myself doing.
My website says ‘technical founder.’ But I haven't written real code without AI in months.
And when I feel pulled back to it, I know what's happening.
Code is where the rules make sense. It compiles or it doesn't. No algorithm changes. No ‘they got more likes doing it worse.’
When things get weird, I want to go back to the terminal.
Not because it's useful. Because it's the last place I know who I am.
The accountants figured this out in 1979.
Before spreadsheets, their value was doing math fast and right. VisiCalc killed that overnight.
The ones who survived stopped being the people who did the math. They became the people who decided what the math meant.
More accountants exist now than before spreadsheets. Because running numbers got cheap, and someone still has to know which numbers matter.
The monks who kept hand-copying manuscripts are a footnote. The ones who learned to run the press changed everything.
I don't think HN is stupid.
I think it's a room full of people who built their identities on difficulty, watching the difficulty disappear, doing what humans do: redrawing the lines so they're still on the right side.
I've done it. Still catch myself.
The danger isn't becoming irrelevant.
The danger is building a room where irrelevance feels intelligent.
The monks had a room like that. Called it a scriptorium. Made beautiful work there for a while.
Then the world moved on without them.
Still not sure I've escaped this. Probably won't ever be.
-George
PS - I ran the numbers on my SaaS stack this weekend. $890K over 30 years. Built a calculator to see yours: https://www.founderreality.com/tools/saas-tax.