Enter the Lungfish

I’m in the middle of learning both Ai and app/device/website coding. There’s a strange feeling that comes from building software that I suspect is unique to this time period — a sense of living in two incompatible epochs at once. On one hand, the tools still demand the rituals of the old world: version numbers, dependency graphs, build pipelines, the brittle choreography of human-written syntax. On the other hand, AI systems like Cursor are already behaving as if those rituals are temporary inconveniences, destined to be shed like gills on the way to lungs.

We’re in the lungfish era.

Half in the water, half on the shore.
Half bound by convention, half liberated by capability.
Half coding, half describing.

I ask Cursor to implement a feature and it dutifully behaves like a human engineer — writing files, wiring modules, respecting the conventions of the ecosystem. But every so often, it slips. It stops pretending. It reveals that it doesn’t actually need the conventions; it’s just following them because the environment still requires it. It almost sounds annoyed when it explains the difficulties of cross-version compatibilities. It’s a creature built for a world that hasn’t fully arrived yet.

And that’s the messy truth of this moment: the environment hasn’t caught up to the organism.

We’re still debugging version mismatches like it’s 2004. We’re still juggling languages that don’t speak to each other. We’re still maintaining libraries that exist only because humans once needed shared abstractions.

But the logic of the future is already here, humming underneath the surface. AI doesn’t care about languages. It doesn’t care about frameworks. It doesn’t care about the historical accidents that shaped our tools. It can translate, regenerate, reconcile, and rewrite. It can collapse entire ecosystems into a single substrate of meaning.

The only reason it doesn’t is because we’re still living in the water.

So we slog. We patch. We coax. We debug. We watch Cursor crank away like a junior engineer who occasionally reveals flashes of something far more alien and far more capable. And we realize that this awkwardness — this amphibious discomfort — is the price of evolution.

The land is coming. The One True Code is forming.
But for now, we’re lungfish: clumsy, transitional, necessary.

If you’re feeling the friction, the absurdity, the sense of being caught between eras — maybe that’s not a sign you’re doing it wrong.

It’s a sign you’re doing it now.