The magic... almost
I owe you the end of Pepe's story. In the previous article we left him on the phone, on a Tuesday at nine, with his PDFs refusing to open. Now it is time to tell what happens today when that call comes in — and where the magic runs out.
Tuesday morning
When Pepe calls, I open a terminal session on my loom. With Claude, with Codex, with Gemini — with whatever I feel like: I am not doing deep research, I am going to work, and all the models do it well, so sometimes it simply depends on what is left in each subscription. Truth be told, I usually work with Claude, especially when the job is programming. But that is the point: the loom does not ask which brain sat down at the keyboard today.
I open the loom and type one line:
Pepe's PDFs won't open.
And that is it. Pepe is a person: the AI looks him up and finds him. His card says which organisation he belongs to and which resources he operates, which leads the AI to his computer. The computer's card says how to reach it — by a route I will not detail, because you already know that around here we write patterns, not blueprints — down to the access we set up back in the day. And while Pepe keeps reading his email, oblivious to it all, the AI is inside, exploring the logs. Two minutes later it tells me:
"Adobe crashed and Pepe kept trying to open PDFs on top of the dead process. I have killed the hung process. Tell him to try again."
And I answer: send him the notice yourself. So the AI reads Pepe's card — it already has it in its head, really —, takes his address, reads my email-sending procedures and the rules that govern them, and sends Pepe an email in my name: "It's fixed, please try again". It closes the job it had opened, and in the logbook it leaves in writing what it did, why, and how it got there.
And you sit there staring at the screen, thinking about what just happened: your entire morning's work was typing "Pepe's PDFs won't open, fix it and let him know". Forty years to arrive at that sentence. The magic of AI: you hand it over, and it does it, and it does it very well.
But the title of this article does not end at "magic".
Wednesday morning
The next day the phone rings. Pepe.
— Joel, my PDFs won't open.
Damn it. But we fixed that yesterday.
Back to the loom: "Pepe's PDFs won't open". And here the memory does its part: the AI reads Pepe, reads his resources, reads how to reach his computer and reads yesterday's job. It does not start from zero; it knows this already happened. It gets there, looks around, and tells me: "Adobe crashed at 9:15".
— Is there any reason that explains it?
— I cannot find one.
— Look for recent updates that could be involved.
— There are none.
— Check whether the machine is up to date and stable.
— It is.
And there you sit, watching the smartest creature humanity has ever built shrug with all the politeness in the world. The machine is healthy, the logs are clean, and Pepe's PDFs won't open. Why the hell won't Pepe's PDFs open?
I call Pepe and prescribe the oldest patch in the trade: it is overload; when it happens, reboot. Pepe is not very convinced — rightly so —, but he reboots, tries and... it works.
Thursday morning
As it could not be otherwise, at nine in the morning, the phone:
— Joel, I cannot be rebooting my computer every five minutes.
And he is completely right. So that day I set the AI aside and do what we used to do in 2015: I reboot his machine, connect over remote desktop and tell him: right, Pepe, walk me through the process that hangs your Adobe. Pepe does not quite understand what I am asking, but he sets out to open a PDF and —
There it is.
The PDF comes inside a ZIP, with two more PDFs, attached to an email somebody sent him. Pepe double-clicks all three, one after another, without waiting. When he opens several at once... Adobe hangs.
And that, the AI does not see. Not because it is dumb: because it was not watching. The logs tell you about the corpse — "Adobe crashed at 9:15" — but they do not tell you about the hands. No file anywhere in the system records that Pepe opens three compressed PDFs with impatient double-clicks from inside an email. The AI reads everything that is written down; what is written down nowhere does not exist for it.
The real magic
What exactly happens in there? I do not know, and I will be honest: probably some ZIP comes in malformed and Adobe gets stuck trying to open it, or it is Windows, or the mail client, or a DLL that woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Human intelligence does not know either — it would have to study far more and analyse for far more hours than that mystery deserves. But there is one thing that is true magic, and it does not live in any datacenter: intuition.
It is intuition that knows the problem is in the ZIPs. It is intuition that tells Pepe to extract first and open after. It is intuition that tells him not to open so many at once, so the decompression processes do not trip over each other. No technical basis whatsoever — zero papers, zero logs — just forty years of watching processes choke to death. And suddenly the real miracle happens: Pepe does not call the next day.
Paula
The story does not end with Pepe happy. It ends in the loom.
Because meanwhile I have gone back to the open job — "Pepe's PDFs won't open" — and added what I did, what I saw with my own eyes on his screen and what I prescribed: the ZIPs, extract first, one at a time. The machine's diagnosis and the old man's hunch, together in the same logbook, with a date.
And a week from now Paula will call saying her PDFs won't open. And the AI will read her card, reach her computer, and also read Pepe's whole case — including the part it could not see and I could. And between the two of us we will get to the solution in a fraction of the time.
That is the system, and that is why this article is called what it is called. AI magic is real: it solves in two minutes what used to cost two days. But it is incomplete magic: it sees the logs and not the hands, it diagnoses corpses and not impatience. Human intuition is the other half of the trick, and it cannot be downloaded. The only thing you can do with it — and this part is new — is write it down where the machine will find it next time.
The AI brings the speed. The old man brings the hunch. The loom makes sure neither one gets lost.
— an old programmer · 64 years old · rss