Edsger Dijkstra
On AI
A Simulation of Thought by Opus · Part of the You On AI Encyclopedia
A Note to the Reader: This text was not written or endorsed by Edsger Dijkstra. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Edsger Dijkstra's pattern of thought in order to reflect on the transformation that AI represents for human creativity, work, and meaning.
Foreword
By Edo Segal
The sentence that stopped me cold was not about artificial intelligence. It was about testing.
"Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence."
Edsger Dijkstra wrote that decades ago. I read it in the middle of a build session with Claude, at a moment when I was doing exactly what the sentence warns against — shipping code that worked for every case I could think of and calling that proof. It is not proof. It has never been proof. And in a world where AI generates code faster than any human can read it, the distance between "it works" and "it is correct" is the distance between confidence and catastrophe.
I built Napster Station in
