The cactus was dying, which was supposed to be impossible.
When Cadence Systems announces Project Lighthouse — an AI-first engineering model that will transform programmers from creators into "orchestrators" — Karthik Sundaram, a forty-three-year-old staff engineer in Boston, discovers that the craft he spent twenty-one years mastering is becoming obsolete. Not wrong. Not inefficient. Just unnecessary.
Around him, the people who built the systems begin to scatter. Sanjay, his closest friend, is laid off and reinvents himself as a jockey riding machines he used to build. Priya, a junior engineer who has never known programming without AI, secretly builds a web server by hand — and discovers that the struggle is where understanding lives. Mervin, a former principal engineer, retreats to a Dorchester workshop to build Basalt: a comprehensible system with more lines of comments than code. Harish, who left tech to run a South Indian mess in Shrewsbury, grinds batter on stone grinders his grandmother once used, preserving a different kind of craft with his hands.
And Karthik — musician, cook, reluctant novelist — finds three bugs in the billing system that the AI will never catch, because catching them requires knowing *why* banker's rounding exists, how daylight saving time works across borders, and what the EU tax code changed in 2024. Knowledge that lived in the heads of people who were let go. Knowledge that left the building when they did.
*We Mourn Our Craft* is a novel about the quiet death of understanding in the age of artificial intelligence. It is about the gap between code that works and code that is understood. About the grief of watching a profession transform and the defiance of continuing to care. About dosa batter and bansuri ragas and the particular kind of knowing that accumulates slowly, over years, like silt in a river — and what happens when the river is rerouted.
Warm, funny, technically precise, and deeply felt — for anyone who has ever built something with their hands and wondered whether the building still matters.
