Complexity Escape

For a hot minute this summer I was working on a second-brain type repo called Elixir-mind, which was an attempt to rein in my agent-driven development (ok vibe coded) workflow which spun out of control building a different epistemic knowledge base called Composable-beliefs. Both fell pray to the same phonomenon, which is something I call complexity escape.

Complexity escape, in my world, means the complexity of the system has escaped my understanding of it, and gaining understanding would take more effort than it would take to rebuild the thing from scratch. Like Calhoun's mouse utopia experiments, once the civilization has begun its descent into self-elimination there is no saving it.

I have a rubric I've developed for when I've hit it. When you have a backlog of todo items or plans (in whatever system you have adopted to keep track of such things) that you no longer understand, or even want to understand, and you have a strong desire to tell the agent to just knock out the list of things until you're finally caught up, and you promise at that point you will learn what it is you have built - if you hit this point, you have hit complexity escape, and you are in trouble. Cause, when you rubber stamp approve all those backlog items, and finally get to that point, I'll tell you exactly what you WON'T do, which is learn what it is you have built, but I can tell you what you WILL do, return to discussing new features with the agent. In the same way humans need their narrative experiences to be ego-congruent, agent based dev drives the human operator towards agent-mediated delivery of truth. This is a ray - a line with a fixed start point extending forever in one direction. Build.

Now when you move on to build the next improved version, there seems to often be something to mine, something to take into the next project - an idea, concept, construct. Often it seems to be reproduced with much more clarity and in a simpler fashion, the natural result of going into it with some battle scars. The first run through was essentially establishing the spec. Its still not ideal, to put it charitably. Its not susntainable. But if you can move quickly enough, and keep your architecture modular, it might just become a new way of looking at what a POC really is. The question is - was what you learned transportable? Is there something you can bring with you, besides a hazy series of memories of conversations with an all knowing friendly sociopathic virtual software developer?

The really insidious thing about complexity escape is the gradient along which it arises. It starts much earlier than we might think. Like, the first prompt in many cases. Nothing in this world comes for free, understanding least of all.

To make the leap to music composition - complexity escape is the point at which AI tools or outright generation has led to a severing of the cord between the composer and the piece, where the composer becomes emotionally and intellectually removed from the process of creation. This happens when you reach too high an abstraction level and no longer encounter problems. A good example is the fact that a lot of the best music is created by someone trying to do something and failing. For example, Kurt Cobain was trying to rip off the Pixies when he wrote Smells Like Teen Spirit.

When you hit complexity escape with music, which is effectively instantly with Suno and other generators, the artifact, the music itself, exists for its own sake, independent of you as a seed source. You may have supplied a prompt which guided the role of the dice. But there is no way for you to be designated a creator, as a creator has to always encounter resistance. Creation is the art of problem solving. If you don't have a problem, you don't have art.