Yuk Hui

Foreword

By Edo Segal

I remember the exact moment I stopped understanding what I was building.

It wasn't dramatic. No alarms. No existential crisis — not yet. I was watching one of our engineers in Bangalore ship a product in two hours that would have taken his team two weeks the year before. He was talking to an AI system built in San Francisco, trained on English-language text, optimized by researchers who'd never set foot in his city, and deployed through infrastructure he'd never own. And it worked. Beautifully. The code was clean. The product was real. The compression was intoxicating.

I called it productive vertigo — that feeling when the ground shifts beneath you and you realize you're not falling, you're flying, but you have no idea who built the wings.

That