Not my father’s – that came later. These were the funerals of people whose relationship to me had no clean English name. Not close family. Not friends in the sense my colleagues would recognise. Something denser and older than either: a web of connection with obligations that were real and binding and entirely impossible to explain to anyone who hadn’t grown up inside them.

I would tell my employer I needed to take a day’s leave. For what? A funeral. Whose? And there it would stall – because there was no English word for what these people were to me, and no English social norm that could explain why their death required me to be present, in person, on that day, without negotiation.

On the morning my father died, I had another funeral to attend. I went. The husband of the woman we were burying came to my house that evening to pay his respects. He had buried his wife that afternoon. He came to my house.

Is that language? Is it culture? I have been asking myself that question for sixty years, and I cannot separate the two. A language doesn’t just carry words. It carries obligations, relationships, the entire architecture of belonging. When you lose one, you lose both.

Greeks have a word for what I’ve been describing: filotimo (φιλότιμο). It translates literally as “love of honour” or “friend of honour,” which tells you almost nothing about what it actually means. Filotimo encompasses hospitality, community connection, personal honour, and social obligations so deeply embedded in Greek life that asking a Greek person to define it is like asking them to define “heavy.” They know what it is. Something either has it or doesn’t. No further explanation is available, or needed.

The man who came to my house on the night of my father’s death had filotimo. His presence was not an act of grief management or social performance. It was the automatic expression of a value so fundamental it required no decision. In English, I can explain that to you. But I cannot make you feel it the way a Greek person feels it – which is the whole problem.

I’ve tried to explain the difference between the two languages like this. A gifted writer in English can explain a feeling or emotion so that you understand it. A gifted writer in Greek can actually evoke that feeling in you. They are not the same thing.

The same thing happens in song, where the words are only the surface of what is being said. Here is a refrain from a popular Greek song, Ο Αετός – The Eagle:

Ο αετός πεθαίνει στον αέρα
ελεύθερος και δυνατός
της απονιάς όταν τον βρίσκει σφαίρα
τον αγκαλιάζει ο ουρανός.

The eagle dies in the air
free and powerful
when cruelty’s bullet finds it
the sky embraces it.

The English version is accurate. A non-Greek speaker can follow the narrative. But a Greek speaker cannot hear that verse without a lump in the throat – not because of the words, but because of the thousands of years of imagery underneath them. The pride, the defiance, the embrace of death over submission. You do not learn that from a dictionary. You absorb it over a lifetime of being inside the language, and when the verse arrives it reaches something in you that the English version simply cannot touch.

I arrived at school in Melbourne at five years old without a single word of English. The teacher – an older woman whose name I have probably repressed over the past six decades – drew a “6” on the blackboard and spoke at length to the class. I understood nothing, but I watched the other children begin writing the digit in their exercise books and did the same. Then she spoke again, clearly angry, drew the “6” once more, and this time added a spiral to the lower half – like a snail’s shell. The children began writing. I assumed I had been drawing the “6” incorrectly, so I started drawing it the new way. The teacher saw this and began yelling. She thought I was mocking her. I was trying, as hard as I could, to do the right thing. When I got home, my parents could not understand what I was describing. There was no language in the house for what the school day had been.

There is an irony in all of this that I only fully appreciated much later. The Greek spoken in Melbourne – the Greek I grew up with, went to Greek school in, and still think in – is in many ways richer in its original vocabulary than what you hear in Greece today. Greece, like every country, has absorbed English words into everyday speech. “Koolare” has replaced the Greek for cool down. “Mi stressaris” has replaced the Greek for don’t stress. Dozens of others have followed. The diaspora community, cut off from that drift, never adopted them. We kept the original words. The community that was supposedly losing its language turns out to have preserved a version of it that the mother country quietly let go.

My oldest grandchild is three. He understands both Greek and English, and he prefers English. My daughter – our first child – speaks the language best of my children; we spoke to her exclusively in Greek until just before she started school, when we made the conscious decision to switch so she could communicate on her first day. My children all completed Greek school through to Year 12. As adults, they all say they wish they had learned more.

That is how it goes. It is not failure. It is the arithmetic of assimilation – slow, patient, and largely invisible until a generation arrives that can no longer quite hear the thing their grandparents heard in a song about an eagle.

What goes with the language when it goes? Not just the vocabulary. Not just the idioms and the untranslatable words. What goes is filotimo itself – the obligation system, the web of connection, the man who drives across the city on the day he buries his wife because your father has just died and that is simply what you do.

You can explain that to people. You can even make them admire it.

But you cannot make them feel the pull of it – the way it sits in the chest as something non-negotiable.

That requires the language. And when the language goes, it takes that with it.

What do people think about the concept of a Universal Basic Income?

At the time, the question had an immediate, practical edge. People were losing jobs. Businesses were closing. Governments were suddenly discovering that income support systems designed for normal unemployment were not built for a whole economy put into suspended animation.

In Australia, JobKeeper and the temporary Coronavirus Supplement showed something important. When the emergency was serious enough, governments could move very quickly to put money into people’s hands. The usual lectures about affordability, incentives and personal responsibility became much less convincing once middle-class incomes were also at risk.

For many people, this was not an abstract policy debate. It was rent. Groceries. Medication. School expenses. A mortgage payment. The small humiliations of suddenly needing help after a lifetime of assuming help was for someone else.

COVID exposed something we usually prefer not to examine. In a society organised around wages, income is not just money. It is independence. It is bargaining power. It is the ability to say no. It is the difference between participating in society and applying for permission to survive.

The virus did not create that fragility. It revealed it.

But the question that interested me then was not only about pandemic relief.

It was a larger question, and it has not gone away.

What happens to a society built around wages when the production of the necessities and luxuries of life requires fewer and fewer human workers?

That is the real UBI question.

Not whether people should be paid to do nothing. That is the lazy version of the argument. The deeper question is this: if paid labour is no longer needed from everyone, what happens to the people whose need for food, housing, medicine, dignity and participation has not disappeared?

Put another way: how do we distribute the wealth that society can still produce?

For the last few centuries, the answer has mostly been wages. Most people receive their share of national wealth by selling their labour. They then use those wages to buy food, housing, clothing, transport, entertainment, education, services, and all the other things that make up modern life.

That arrangement has worked well enough to become almost invisible. Unevenly, unfairly, and sometimes brutally, but well enough that we now treat it as natural.

It is not natural. It is historical.

And history has changed this arrangement before.

Agriculture changed the question

Before agriculture, human societies were organised around hunting, gathering, kinship, mobility and immediate need. That is not to romanticise hunter-gatherer life. It was not an Edenic picnic with berries and good weather. But the economic structure was different. People generally consumed what they could gather, hunt, make, carry or share.

Agriculture changed that.

Once humans could produce food surpluses, society could support people who were not directly producing food. Priests, kings, soldiers, scribes, merchants, builders, artisans and administrators all became possible because not everyone had to spend every day finding the next meal.

That surplus gave us cities, writing, law, architecture, organised religion, mathematics, taxation, armies, bureaucracy and eventually civilisation as we understand it.

It also gave us hierarchy, land ownership, stored wealth, rents, tribute, slavery, serfdom and organised coercion.

Technological progress is rarely morally simple.

Agriculture created abundance compared with what came before, but it also created the problem of who controlled the surplus. If one group controlled the land, grain stores, irrigation systems, weapons and records, another group could be made to work for access to life’s necessities.

The technology changed the productive base. Society then reorganised around that base.

Not always kindly.

Industrialisation changed it again

For a long period, wealth was tied overwhelmingly to land. In feudal societies, peasants or tenant farmers worked land they did not own and retained part of what they produced. Their survival depended on their relationship to landholders and local power.

Then came industrialisation.

The steam engine, mechanised production, factories, railways, coal, steel and mass manufacturing shifted economic power away from land and towards capital, machinery and wage labour. People moved from villages to cities. They no longer retained a portion of what they grew. They sold their time for wages.

That transition was not smooth. It produced appalling working conditions, child labour, slums, political unrest, union movements, socialist movements, public education, expanded suffrage, labour parties, welfare states and eventually the modern social contract.

The point is not that the Industrial Revolution simply made life better. In the long run, it produced enormous wealth. In the short run, it tore apart older ways of life and created new forms of dependence.

But it also produced a new mechanism for distributing purchasing power: wages.

Industrial capitalism needed workers, but it also needed consumers. If ordinary people had no money, they could not buy the products the factories were producing.

So the wage became more than payment for work. It became the central distribution mechanism of industrial society.

Work in the factory, the office, the shop, the school, the hospital, the mine, the railway, the warehouse – and through wages, receive your share of the goods and services that society produces.

Again, not perfectly. Not fairly. Not universally. But sufficiently to become the organising assumption of modern life.

Now the assumption is under pressure

The information age has been putting pressure on that assumption for decades.

Software replaced clerical work. Robotics changed manufacturing. Logistics systems changed warehousing and retail. Online platforms changed media, travel, advertising, music, publishing and commerce. Algorithms changed finance, recruitment, insurance and customer service.

Now artificial intelligence has arrived as the latest and probably most significant part of that longer process.

AI is not simply another machine replacing muscle. It reaches into language, pattern recognition, programming, analysis, administration, law, medicine, education, design, art and management. It does not replace all of those fields outright. But it changes how much human labour is needed to produce a given result.

That is the key point.

The issue is not whether all jobs disappear next Tuesday. They will not.

The issue is whether the economy increasingly produces more goods and services with less human labour. If it does, wages become a less reliable way to distribute purchasing power.

A society can have full shelves, automated farms, robot warehouses, AI-designed products, self-service systems, automated transport, algorithmic management and astonishing productive capacity – while still leaving large numbers of people without adequate income.

That is not because the society is poor.

It is because the distribution mechanism is failing.

The old question: who gets the surplus?

Every major technological transition returns us to the same question.

Who gets the surplus?

In agricultural societies, the surplus was often captured by landowners, kings, temples and states.

In industrial societies, the surplus was contested between capital and labour. Unions, strikes, labour parties, welfare systems, public education, progressive taxation and social democracy were all, in their different ways, attempts to answer the question: how much of the wealth produced by industrial capitalism should flow back to the people whose lives were shaped by it?

The automation age asks the question again.

If machines, software, AI systems, data centres, robots and networks produce more of what we need, who receives the benefit?

Only the owners?

Only shareholders?

Only the companies that control the platforms, models, infrastructure, patents and data?

Or does some part of that productivity belong to the society that made it possible?

That is where the idea of a Universal Basic Income becomes interesting.

At its best, UBI is not charity. It is not welfare in the narrow sense. It is not a grudging payment to the unsuccessful.

It is closer to what Thomas Paine and later Henry George were reaching for in the idea of a citizen’s dividend: a recognition that some portion of wealth arises not from individual effort alone, but from common inheritance – land, resources, law, public infrastructure, accumulated knowledge, language, science, technology, education and generations of social cooperation.

No company invented mathematics. No billionaire invented the legal system that protects property. No platform created the internet from nothing. No AI company created the entire body of human text, art, code, science, culture and conversation on which its systems depend.

Private enterprise matters. Innovation matters. Risk matters. Organisation matters.

But so does the common inheritance.

A citizen’s dividend says that if our shared civilisation produces an ever-rising surplus, every citizen has some claim on that surplus.

That, to me, is the moral foundation of UBI.

But UBI cannot mean abandoning people

There is, however, a serious trap.

One version of UBI says: give every adult a flat payment and abolish all other welfare.

There is something attractive about that. It would sweep away a humiliating and expensive bureaucracy. No more endless forms, compliance tests, punitive surveillance, mutual obligation theatre, poverty traps, arbitrary eligibility rules, or armies of administrators paid to decide whether desperate people are sufficiently deserving.

A universal payment is simple. It is unconditional. It does not punish someone for taking casual work. It does not require the unemployed to perform despair for the state. It does not treat poverty as a character defect.

But the phrase “replace all welfare” hides a problem.

People do not all have the same needs.

A healthy adult with no dependants does not have the same needs as a person with severe disability. A single renter in an expensive city does not have the same needs as someone who owns a home outright. A carer looking after a disabled child or elderly parent does not have the same needs as someone with no caring responsibilities. A remote community does not face the same costs as an inner-city suburb.

If UBI becomes an excuse to abolish targeted support for people with greater needs, it fails morally.

So the better model is not simply “UBI replaces everything”.

The better model is this: UBI provides the income floor, while the state guarantees the necessities of a dignified life.

That means health care. Education. Disability support. Aged care. Housing security. Public transport where practical. Digital access. Child support. Care infrastructure. The things without which a person cannot realistically participate in society.

In Australia, that distinction matters because we already accept part of it. Medicare is not a cash payment. Public education is not a cash payment. The Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme is not a cash payment. The NDIS, despite its many problems, is based on the recognition that disability support cannot be reduced to “here is the same amount everyone else gets; good luck”.

A serious UBI would have to sit within that broader architecture.

Cash for ordinary life. Public provision for essential human need.

Would people stop working?

The most common objection to UBI is that people would stop working.

Some would.

That answer is not as frightening as it is meant to be.

Some people would stop doing work that is pointless, degrading, badly paid or harmful. Some would leave jobs that only exist because people are desperate enough to take them. Some would spend more time caring for children, parents, partners, neighbours, or themselves. Some would study. Some would start small businesses. Some would make art, music, gardens, software, furniture, meals, clubs and communities. Some would do very little for a while because they are exhausted.

We should be honest about that.

But we should also ask why we are so attached to the idea that survival must be conditional on labour, even when that labour is not socially necessary.

There is a difference between work and employment.

Raising children is work. Caring for a dying parent is work. Maintaining a community organisation is work. Learning is work. Creating is work. Volunteering is work. Mentoring is work. Preserving culture is work. Being a decent neighbour is work.

The market recognises some of these things only when they are packaged, priced and sold. That does not mean the unpaid versions have no value.

A society less dependent on compulsory wage labour may not be a society without work. It may be a society in which we finally admit that employment has never been the only form of contribution.

Can we afford it?

The practical objection is cost.

A full UBI is expensive. There is no point pretending otherwise.

But cost depends on design.

A UBI can replace some existing payments. It can reduce some administrative overhead. It can be taxed back from higher earners through the income and corporate tax systems. It can be introduced gradually. It can begin as a partial payment. It can be linked to resource revenues, carbon dividends, land value taxation, sovereign wealth funds, or taxes on economic rents.

In Australia, we have particular reasons to think about this. We are a resource-rich country. We already have a relatively centralised tax and transfer system. We already provide universal health care in principle, if not always in practice. We already understand the aged pension as a broad social entitlement rather than a personal moral failure.

We also have an expensive, punitive and often absurd welfare compliance system.

The question is not whether a perfect UBI can be dropped from the sky next Monday.

It cannot.

The question is whether we can begin moving towards a system where every citizen has an unconditional income floor, while the necessities of dignified life are secured collectively.

That might begin through increases to existing universal or near-universal payments. It might begin with children. It might begin with older citizens. It might begin with a carbon dividend or resource dividend. It might begin with a negative income tax. It might begin during the next economic shock, just as COVID forced governments to do previously unthinkable things in a matter of weeks.

Political feasibility often arrives disguised as emergency.

Inflation and housing

There is one objection that deserves more attention than it usually receives: inflation.

If everyone receives more cash, but the supply of essential goods does not increase, prices may rise. This is especially true for housing.

A UBI paid into a broken housing market could become a landlord subsidy. Give tenants more money, and rents may simply rise to absorb it.

That is not an argument against UBI. It is an argument against thinking about UBI in isolation.

Income policy cannot substitute for housing policy. A citizen’s dividend cannot fix monopolies, rent-seeking, land speculation, health bottlenecks, or underbuilt infrastructure by itself.

If the necessities of life are privately rationed through scarcity pricing, any cash payment risks being captured by those who control access to necessity.

So UBI must be part of a larger settlement.

It must sit alongside housing reform, public services, competition policy, infrastructure investment and serious taxation of economic rents.

Otherwise, we may simply pour public money into private tollbooths.

The politics will be difficult

UBI attracts strange coalitions.

Some on the left like it because it reduces poverty, strengthens workers’ bargaining power, recognises unpaid care and treats people with dignity.

Some libertarians like it because it could simplify welfare, reduce bureaucracy and give individuals cash instead of state-managed services.

Some in Silicon Valley like it because they can see that automation may undermine the consumer base on which their own businesses ultimately depend.

But those coalitions fracture quickly over the details.

Is UBI a supplement to public services or a replacement for them?

Is it funded by taxing wealth and economic rents, or by cutting support for the vulnerable?

Is it a genuine citizen’s dividend, or a cheap payment that lets employers offer worse jobs and governments abandon responsibility?

Is it enough to live on, or merely enough to pacify people?

These questions matter.

A bad UBI could be worse than no UBI. It could become a tool for dismantling the welfare state while leaving people to fend for themselves in rigged markets.

A good UBI would do the opposite. It would reduce coercion. It would make survival less dependent on pleasing an employer, a bureaucrat, or an algorithm. It would give people a base from which to participate in society.

That is the distinction.

UBI should not be hush money for a discarded workforce.

It should be a share in the productivity of a society that no longer needs everyone’s labour in the old way.

The unavoidable question

I am mildly, cautiously, conditionally in favour of UBI.

Not because I think it is simple. It is not.

Not because I think it solves everything. It does not.

Not because I think everyone will use it wisely. They will not. But that has never been the standard applied to tax cuts, inheritances, corporate subsidies, negative gearing, capital gains concessions, or executive bonuses.

I am in favour of taking it seriously because the question behind it is becoming unavoidable.

For most of the industrial age, the wage system did two things at once. It organised production, and it distributed purchasing power.

Automation weakens that link.

If fewer people are needed to produce the goods and services society wants, insisting that everyone must obtain income through paid employment becomes increasingly irrational. We can try to preserve the old model with make-work, surveillance welfare, insecure gig work, pointless compliance rituals and moral lectures about self-reliance.

Or we can ask a more adult question.

If our machines, systems, institutions, knowledge and accumulated civilisation can produce abundance, how should that abundance be shared?

Agriculture forced one answer. Industrialisation forced another.

The information age – and now AI – may force the next.

Universal Basic Income may not be the final answer. It may not even be the best phrase. Perhaps citizen’s dividend captures the moral idea better. Perhaps we will arrive there through a negative income tax, public services, resource dividends, or some hybrid we have not yet named.

But the central issue will not go away.

If human labour is no longer necessary at the scale it once was, human survival cannot remain conditional on selling labour.

That is the conversation we need to have.

Not someday.

Now.

A short out-of-cycle post, prompted by a recent Melbourne story and by memories I have carried for many years. Regular Tuesday publication will continue next week.

A recent story from Melbourne was almost designed to break your heart.

An elderly couple, both living with dementia, left a care facility only days after arriving. They wanted to go home. The husband left their daughter a message: “Don’t worry, thank you for your help, I’ll make sure I look after her.” They were found safe 32 hours later, more than 160 kilometres away.

Of course they wanted to be home. Of course their daughter was terrified.

And of course the easy reading of the story is that two devoted people had been imprisoned by a system, while their family stood by. That is the sort of judgement stories like this invite. It is also the sort of judgement made most readily by people who have never had to keep someone with dementia safe through the night.

I sympathise with the couple. I sympathise just as much with their daughter.

There is a persistent moral hierarchy around aged care. The family who keeps an elderly parent at home is held up as loving and dutiful. The family who places one in care is treated with suspicion. Sometimes openly. More often through the little questions and insinuations: Couldn’t they have managed a bit longer? Didn’t they have family?

Yes, there are people who abandon their elders, exploit them or treat them as an inconvenience to be disposed of. We all know that happens. But it is a mistake to allow those grim cases to define every family whose parent ends up in residential care.

Most of the people I saw in care were not dumped there. They were loved. That was the problem.

When love is not enough

My mother was formally diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at the age of 57. We had noticed changes in her behaviour a couple of years earlier, but a diagnosis has a way of making an unwelcome possibility real.

For several years my father, who was eight years older than Mum, cared for her in their home. My wife went regularly to help around the house. At the time we had a baby daughter, and then two boys arrived in quick succession. We had three very young children ourselves, but we did what families do: we helped where we could.

Then Mum began to wander.

Dad did his best to stop her, but dementia does not respect locks, schedules or a carer’s need to sleep. On more than one occasion we had to call the police to help search for her. Thankfully she was found safe. We never worked out how she had got as far as she did, wearing a nightgown and slippers.

My sister and I tried to tell Dad that this was no longer manageable at home. He would not have a bar of it.

He believed it was his job to care for his wife. That was not stubbornness in the ordinary sense. It came from devotion, from the vows he had made and from a generation which took those vows literally. I suspect there was something else too. He knew that people in his social circle would judge him if he put Mum into care.

He was right about that.

The turning point came one night when Mum woke, did not recognise the man beside her, went to the garage, found a large piece of lumber and returned to the bedroom. She aimed a blow at Dad’s head while he slept.

Fortunately, it glanced off the side of his head. He was injured, but a direct strike would probably have killed him.

That is a horrible thing to write about my mother. But it was not really my mother who did it. It was a terrible illness acting through the person we loved. And it made something brutally clear: caring for her now required somebody to be awake and alert 24 hours a day.

There was no way to provide that safely in their home.

It took more than a year for a place to become available. That is another failure, and a very Australian one. We tell families to seek help, then leave them waiting while the crisis deepens. Eventually Mum entered a care home and Dad was alone in the house they had shared.

The carer who could not stop caring

We asked Dad to move in with us. He refused. My wife, now with three primary-school-aged children and a 30-minute drive each way, continued to go over every day or two to help with housework. Some of Dad’s closest friends, who lived nearby, stepped up as well.

Eventually Dad had a fall. He could not get up or reach the phone. He lay there for a couple of days before we found him.

Only then did he agree to move in with us.

We converted our formal lounge into a downstairs master suite. He lived with us for the next eight years, until he died. He had his children and three of his grandchildren around him. Yet he did not really get to enjoy them nor my sister and her two whom he saw even less.

Every day he went to see Mum in the nursing home. Every. Day. When he came back home, he spent much of his time in his room. He joined us for dinner, but not for much else.

He was physically tired and emotionally spent.

That is the part outsiders so often fail to see. The decision to move someone into care does not end the caring. For many families it starts a different, exhausting stage of it: visits, advocacy, guilt, grief, phone calls, medical decisions and the slow loss of the person they knew.

Dad did not place Mum in care because he loved her less. He did it because he had finally accepted that love alone could not keep her safe, or keep him safe.

The judgement of people who have not been there

Outside his closest friends, Dad was criticised for the decision. Some of that criticism came to me and my family as well.

It was not always cruelly said. That almost made it worse. There was a quiet assumption that a sufficiently committed family would cope. That keeping a person at home was simply a matter of will.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Years later, after both my parents had died, I was in Greece when a cousin pulled us aside. His own mother was by then in the advanced stages of dementia. He told us that he had been critical of our family for putting “his aunt” in a home. Only after he lived through his mother’s illness did he understand.

“His aunt.” As if he had cared more for her than we had cared for our own mother.

I appreciated the honesty. I also thought: this is how easily people pronounce from a safe distance.

Dementia does not merely make somebody forgetful. It can change judgement, sleep, perception, impulse control and behaviour. It can turn a familiar home into a dangerous maze. It can leave an elderly spouse trying to manage emergencies that would overwhelm a team of trained people working shifts.

A home can be the best place for an older person for a long time. With the right support, it often is. But there comes a point for some families when remaining at home is no longer a preference. It is a risk.

The difficult question is not, “Do they want to go home?” Almost everyone would. The difficult question is, “Can they be safe there, and can the people who love them remain safe too?”

A little more mercy

The Melbourne couple’s story is sad because their wish was understandable. They had been married for 65 years. They did not feel comfortable in care. They felt choices were being taken from them. Their daughter had every reason to fear what might happen to two vulnerable people on their own, especially when one believed he could still protect the other.

Those things are not contradictions. They are the tragedy.

We should absolutely demand better aged care: more places, better staffing, more personal attention, more freedom where freedom is safe, and real support for families before they reach breaking point.

But we should stop casually judging the daughter, son, spouse or sibling who makes the decision nobody wanted to make.

Sometimes placing someone in care is not the moment a family gives up.

Sometimes it is the last act of care they have left.

She fed me. I didn’t think anything of it at the time.

The teasing that followed lasted for months. My classmates had clearly never seen anything like it: a mother at school during lunchtime, a soup they didn’t recognise, a transaction between parent and child that violated some unwritten rule about where mothers belonged and what lunch was supposed to look like. I was old enough to understand that something had gone wrong. I was not old enough to explain what it was.

My mother couldn’t see it. That’s the thing I came to understand later. It wasn’t stubbornness – she genuinely could not see the world I was navigating, because it wasn’t the world she was living in. When I asked her to stop coming to school, she heard me. She adapted. From then on, she packed my lunch.

Mortadella and feta cheese on split vienna bread, spread with olive oil.

(You can get that sandwich at most good cafes in Melbourne now. In 1966, it marked you as an alien.)

The house we grew up in spoke Greek. My parents had arrived in Australia separately in the early 1950s, both from villages in Greece, with a rudimentary primary school education. They met in Melbourne and were building a life from nothing – my father on the factory floor, my mother at the sewing machine. His sister and her husband lived with us; they were childless, and my sister and I were effectively theirs as well. Off the living room there was a small room where two commercial sewing machines had been installed, and most evenings you could hear them running well into the night while my sister and I turned collars and belts outside-in as they came off the machines.

My father and uncle would come home from the factory, wash up, and go straight out to the vegetable garden. When the factory closed for holidays, the men took temporary work. The women kept sewing.

There was always someone at the kitchen table who wasn’t quite family but wasn’t quite not. The Greek community in Melbourne had its own infrastructure: you arrived with nothing, someone put you up until you found work, and when you were steady you did the same for the next person off the boat. It was not charity. It was physics.

Next door was a family with four children, the oldest my age. What I noticed first was the freedom: they played outside until all hours, came and went without the gravitational pull that kept us close to home. They had a car – something my family would not own for another fifteen years. They took holidays.

They were also renting the same house their grandfather had first moved into. Meanwhile, almost every family in our Greek social circle was buying. The apparent insiders weren’t building. The apparent outsiders were.

A few doors further along lived an elderly woman who took my mother under her wing. My mother’s English was limited enough that I translated most of their conversations – standing in a doorway at seven or eight years old, converting not just words but entire worlds for each of them. It was that woman who later advised my mother to have us sit the selective high school entrance exam. My parents had no way to pay private school fees, and no way of knowing selective schools existed. Without that conversation, a door simply doesn’t open.

The world outside the house was not uniformly kind. Derogatory slurs were common enough that they stopped surprising me. The physical incidents were rarer, but they stayed. I remember a school excursion in Year 7, walking around Albert Park Lake with the class. Two older boys came toward us from the opposite direction. As one of them passed me, he punched me hard on the cheek and called me a dirty wog.

The teacher escorting us looked away.

That moment did something I don’t think those boys intended. Instead of pushing me toward assimilation – more English, less Greek, different food, different music – it pushed me the other way. I joined a Greek dancing team. I listened to Greek popular music almost exclusively. I stayed in after-school Greek language classes all the way through to my final year of high school. If the country of my birth was going to keep reminding me I was a foreigner, I would find somewhere else to belong.

I was a foreigner living in the land of my birth. That was simply how things were.

Things changed, though not in the way I expected. After dropping out of my Dentistry degree to the consternation of my father, I completed a commercial training course in Computer Programming. I got my first professional job at Telecom Australia almost as an experiment because my qualifications were commercial, not a recognised degree, and some of my more senior colleagues later admitted they’d wanted to see whether someone like me could handle the work. I could. I was the first of my intake to be promoted, and before I turned 25 I was the Facilities Manager for the largest computer installation in the southern hemisphere.

What I learned – and heard echoed by other Greek-Australian professionals making their way in those years – is that denigration has a practical ceiling. It simply cannot withstand the reality of working alongside people who are clearly better at the job than the people doing the denigrating. Melbourne was changing too. Multicultural Australia was becoming less theoretical and more actual. The slurs didn’t disappear overnight, but they lost authority.

The first time I went to Greece as an adult, something was immediately clear: the Greece my parents had carried with them to Melbourne was not the Greece that still existed. The community they had built in Melbourne was extraordinary and genuinely generous – and it had preserved, almost perfectly, the Greece of the 1950s and ‘60s. While Melbourne’s Greek community maintained the old world in amber, Greece itself had kept moving.

For the original migrants, going back was often a disappointment. The country they’d held in their hearts had changed shape without asking permission. For those of us born in Australia, the experience was different. The Greece we found was, in certain ways, less conservative than the community we’d grown up in. Less bound by the old rules. More comfortable with itself.

The relatives who had stayed had their own mythology about the emigrants: that Australia was a street paved with easy money, and the people who left had simply shovelled it up. They had no framework for what the immigrants had actually lived through – the factory floors, the cold, the vegetable gardens that substituted for the villages they’d left behind. That mythology has largely dissolved since the financial crisis. Greeks who have lived through real hardship understand now what the hunger migration of the 1950s was actually about.

I have owned an apartment in Greece for some years now. We come every year and stay for months. The people here don’t think of us as foreigners. We are simply the Australians – which is entirely accurate, and entirely comfortable. Being called the Australians in Greece is not what being called a dirty wog in Melbourne was. One was designed to cast you out. The other just says what you are.

I was born in Australia. I have worked there, raised my children there, and I am proud to call it home. I also feel, in a way that resists precise explanation, that Greece is home too. Something in the land and the language that feels less like a choice and more like a fact.

I grew up between two worlds. I live there still.

It turns out that’s enough.

This is not another “AI will/won’t replace programmers” piece; it is about responsibility for design.

In 1992, Jack Reeves wrote an essay called What Is Software Design? His argument was simple, but it cut across the way many managers, clients, and even developers thought about software.

Source code, Reeves argued, is not the manufactured product.

Source code is the design.

The compiler is the factory.

That distinction matters. In traditional engineering, a bridge designer produces drawings, calculations, models, and specifications. Then somebody else builds the bridge. The blueprint is the design; the physical bridge is the manufactured artifact.

Software does not work that way.

When we write source code, we are not merely “building” something from a design that already exists. We are making the design itself. Every class, function, interface, database choice, error path, naming decision, and boundary between components is part of the real design of the system.

The compiled binary, the deployed service, the running application – that is the manufactured result.

This is one of the central arguments I made in my book, Code is Design. The software industry gets into trouble when it imports the wrong mental model from construction and manufacturing. It treats programming as if it were bricklaying, when in reality it is much closer to engineering design.

And now AI has arrived, with a rather awkward question.

If code is design, what happens when a machine can draft that design in seconds?

The Compiler Is No Longer the Only Machine in the Room

For decades, the compiler was the great automation engine in software.

A human being wrote the source code. The compiler converted that design into machine instructions. The manufacturing step was almost entirely automated.

That was already extraordinary. No civil engineer presses a button and gets a bridge. No architect clicks “compile” and receives an office tower. Software has always been different because the distance between design and manufactured artifact is so short.

But generative AI changes the machinery around the design step itself.

A large language model can now produce thousands of lines of plausible source code in seconds. It can create scaffolding, APIs, tests, configuration files, documentation, user interfaces, database schemas, and whole application skeletons with impressive speed.

At first glance, this looks like a massive productivity jump.

And sometimes it is.

But there is a trap here. Because the output looks like code, and because code is the design document, we can easily mistake generated code for a completed design.

It is not.

It is a draft. Often a useful draft. Sometimes a surprisingly good draft. But still a draft.

The machine has produced something that resembles a design document by drawing on patterns from the past. It has not understood the business pressures, the political constraints, the operational risks, the compromises already buried in the existing system, or the things nobody wrote down because “everyone knows that”.

Except, of course, everyone does not know that. Especially not the machine.

The Old Bottleneck Has Moved

In the old model, much of the cost of software sat in the act of expression.

A developer had to turn intent into code manually. That meant typing, structuring, naming, testing, correcting, and reshaping. The friction was real. It slowed us down, but it also forced thought.

You could not write a substantial module without making hundreds of small design decisions. Some were explicit. Many were almost subconscious. Where should the responsibility live? What does this object know? What happens when this service is unavailable? Is this condition exceptional, or is it part of the normal flow? Should this rule be enforced here, or nearer the boundary?

That thinking was embedded in the act of coding.

AI reduces the friction of generating the text of the design. That is powerful. But it also means the bottleneck moves.

The hard part is no longer always “Can we produce the code?”

Increasingly, the hard part is:

• Does this code express the right intent?

• Does it fit the system we already have?

• Does it preserve the architectural boundaries?

• Does it fail in ways we understand?

• Can we maintain it six months from now?

• Does anyone actually own the design?

We have automated a large part of design drafting.

We have not automated judgement.

The Reckless Junior Designer

I find it useful to think of AI as an extremely fast junior designer.

Not junior programmer. Junior designer. That distinction matters.

A junior programmer may make syntax mistakes, misuse a library, or need help with tooling. A junior designer may produce something that looks coherent but rests on the wrong assumptions.

That is more dangerous.

The code may compile. The tests may pass. The demo may work. The pull request may even look tidy.

But the assumptions may be wrong.

Perhaps the generated service bypasses an important domain boundary. Perhaps it duplicates logic that already exists elsewhere. Perhaps it handles the happy path beautifully and turns operational failure into a swamp. Perhaps it introduces a dependency that looks harmless but creates a long-term maintenance problem. Perhaps it solves the local problem while making the system harder to reason about.

These are not syntax errors. They are design errors.

And design errors are usually more expensive.

The Review Problem

There is another uncomfortable issue: reviewing generated code can be harder than writing code yourself.

When you write code carefully, you carry its reasoning in your head. You remember why you put the boundary there. You remember the alternative you rejected. You remember the ugly condition that exists because the billing system behaves strangely on the last day of the month. You know which part is clean and which part is a scar from an old production incident.

When AI generates the code, you inherit an alien blueprint.

It may be neat. It may be idiomatic. It may even be better than the first version you would have written.

But you did not travel the path that produced it.

So now you must reverse-engineer not only what the code does, but why it does it that way. And if the answer is merely “because this is a statistically likely shape for this kind of problem”, that is not much comfort.

Software rarely collapses because one line was misspelled.

It collapses because the wrong assumptions were allowed to harden into structure.

The more code we generate, the more discipline we need in reviewing the assumptions behind it. Otherwise, we are not accelerating development. We are accelerating architectural debt.

Accidental Complexity on Steroids

Fred Brooks gave us the useful distinction between essential and accidental complexity.

Essential complexity comes from the problem itself. A payroll system is complicated because employment law, awards, taxation, leave rules, and human arrangements are complicated. No tool removes that.

Accidental complexity comes from the way we choose to build the system: poor boundaries, bad naming, duplicated logic, unnecessary frameworks, tangled dependencies, and layers nobody understands anymore.

AI can help reduce accidental complexity when used well.

It can also multiply it at frightening speed.

The danger is not that AI produces bad code in the obvious sense. The more subtle danger is that it produces plausible code too easily. It fills gaps. It invents structure. It smooths over uncertainty. It gives us something that looks finished before we have done the harder work of deciding what “finished” should mean.

That is why the old “code is design” argument still matters.

In fact, it matters more now.

If source code is the design document, then flooding a project with generated source code is not a harmless act of production. It is a design intervention. Every generated module changes the shape of the system. Every generated abstraction becomes part of the architecture. Every generated test suite encodes an opinion about what matters.

The question is not “Did the AI write code?”

The question is “Who is responsible for the design?”

The Engineer Moves Up a Level

Does this mean AI is useless for serious software work?

No. That would be a silly conclusion.

Used well, AI is a remarkable tool. It can draft options, remove drudgery, explain unfamiliar code, generate test cases, translate between libraries, produce prototypes, and help explore approaches quickly. For experienced developers, it can act as a very fast assistant. For learners, it can provide examples and explanations on demand – though not always reliable ones.

But it does change the developer’s role.

The valuable engineer is no longer merely the person who can produce syntactically correct code. That was never enough, but it is now even less enough.

The valuable engineer is the person who can hold the system in their head.

The person who understands intent.

The person who can say:

• This solution works locally but damages the architecture.

• This abstraction is premature.

• This duplication is acceptable for now.

• This generated code hides an operational risk.

• This test proves behaviour, but not the behaviour we actually care about.

• This design will not survive the next requirement.

That is design work.

It always was.

AI does not remove that responsibility. It exposes it.

Code Is Still Design

So, does AI weaken the “code is design” argument?

I think it does the opposite.

If anything, it proves the point.

The reason generated code matters is precisely because code is not just mechanical output. It is the detailed design of the system. If AI were merely laying bricks, the risk would be lower. But it is drafting structural decisions, sometimes thousands of them, faster than we can comfortably inspect.

That changes the economics of software.

It does not change the nature of software.

The compiler still manufactures the running program. AI now helps draft the design document. But the design still needs intent, judgement, taste, constraint, context, and accountability.

Those are human responsibilities.

At least, they are if we still care whether the thing stands up.

The Real Shift

The real AI shift is not that developers are being replaced as designers.

It is that developers are being forced to become more explicit about design.

For years, much of software design happened invisibly inside the coding process. Good developers made good decisions while writing code. Bad decisions were often hidden behind estimates, deadlines, ticket systems, and the comforting fiction that programming was just implementation.

AI makes that fiction harder to maintain.

If a machine can generate the implementation, then the human contribution has to be clearer. Not more mystical. Not inflated. Just clearer.

What problem are we solving?

What constraints matter?

What must not break?

Where should the boundaries be?

What does this system need to become over time?

Those questions were always the real work. We just allowed the industry to confuse them with typing.

The future developer may write fewer lines by hand. But if they are doing the job properly, they will be thinking harder about the lines that enter the system.

Because code is still design.

And design still needs a designer.

Over the following two to three years, I gained 38 kilograms.

Not because I abandoned the plan. Because I followed it.

To understand how this is possible, you need to understand the food pyramid. This was a nutritional guidance model adopted by governments and health authorities around the world from the early 1990s – a simple visual diagram, ranking food groups by their recommended daily proportions. At the base, the foundation of a healthy diet, the thing you were supposed to eat the most of: grains and carbohydrates. Bread, cereal, rice, pasta. Six to eleven servings a day was the official recommendation. Above that, fruits and vegetables. Higher still, in smaller quantities, dairy and protein. And at the very apex, the smallest sliver: fats, oils, and sweets. To be used sparingly.

Now consider what that means for someone with Type 2 diabetes.

Every carbohydrate converts to blood sugar as the body processes it. Bread. Pasta. Rice. Cereal. For someone whose body already cannot manage blood sugar efficiently, loading every meal with the foods that spike it fastest is the dietary equivalent of telling a person with a broken leg to go for a run. And when the blood glucose dipped – as it inevitably did, because that is what insulin does – the advice was to eat more carbohydrates to compensate. If I was planning more exercise than usual, eat more carbohydrates beforehand. The answer to everything, in the dietary orthodoxy of the time, was more carbohydrates.

My body did exactly what bodies do when they are fed a steady supply of glucose with adequate insulin to process it. It stored the excess as fat. I ate according to the plan. I injected my insulin. I bought the pasta and the bread and the rice and I cooked it according to the prescribed proportions. I tried Jenny Craig. I tried pre-portioned meal delivery services. I lost some weight, then stopped losing it, then put it back on and then some. By the end of those years, I weighed 158 kilograms. I had been 120 kilograms on the day I left hospital.

I want to be precise about what 158 kilograms means in practice, because the number alone doesn’t capture it. It means that cinema seats and aeroplane seats require a strategy. It means that stairs become a calculation. It means that a photograph, when you encounter one unexpectedly, produces a moment of genuine shock – because the image doesn’t match the person you carry in your head. It means that your body is always present, always asserting itself, always requiring management in ways that people who have not carried that weight cannot fully intuit.

I am not telling this story to assign blame. The medical profession is not full of fools, and I want to be clear about that. The dietician who worked with me was doing her job conscientiously and in good faith. The dietary advice I received was the standard advice of its time, endorsed by governments, taught in medical schools, and believed by the professionals delivering it. The problem was not the individuals. The problem was the orthodoxy they had been trained in – and the fact that it was wrong.

We know considerably more now. The evidence accumulated over the past three decades points firmly in a different direction. Protein should form the foundation of the diet. Healthy fats are not the enemy – many are actively beneficial. Carbohydrates should be present but chosen carefully and consumed in moderation, not as the centrepiece of every meal. For someone with Type 2 diabetes specifically, reducing the foods that spike blood glucose is not optional. It is the central dietary principle. The food pyramid had it precisely backwards.

This is not fringe thinking. It is backed by substantial research and has been progressively incorporated into updated guidelines around the world. The original food pyramid has been revised, replaced, and in some jurisdictions quietly retired – as though it simply aged out, rather than did damage on its way out.

That damage is what I want to name clearly, because I don’t think it has been named clearly enough. The people who followed the food pyramid in good faith – diabetics, overweight people, anyone who trusted that their government and their doctors had got the nutritional science right – were following advice that was making them worse. Some of them paid for that with their health. Some of them paid for it with their lives. The fact that the advice was given in good faith does not change the outcome for the people who received it.

When official guidance turns out to be wrong, the institutions that issued it tend to move quietly to the next position. The updated pyramid appears. The new plate model replaces the old one. The guidelines are revised. And the people who spent years doing exactly what they were told are left to work out, largely on their own, what that means for the damage already done.

There is no apology. There is rarely even an acknowledgement.

That is not where you want to be. I know, because I was there.

I write about my own experience managing Type 2 diabetes — thirty-plus years of it. None of this is medical advice. Your situation is not my situation, and nothing here should be a reason to change your diet or treatment without talking to your doctor first.

On 15 May 2026, Leo XIV published Magnifica Humanitas – a document dedicated to artificial intelligence and its implications for the human person. He is the first pope to do this. The timing was deliberate: it fell on the 135th anniversary of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, the 1891 encyclical that launched Catholic social teaching as a serious engagement with industrial capitalism. The parallel is pointed. Leo XIV is saying we have been here before, and we have something to contribute.

Whether or not you share his faith, this document deserves your attention. I’d go further: among everything major institutions have put out on AI in the past few years, Magnifica Humanitas is one of the more honest contributions. Several of its arguments will make both AI enthusiasts and AI pessimists uncomfortable. Good. That’s usually a sign someone is thinking clearly.

The most important move Leo XIV makes is early, and it is not a theological one. AI, he argues, is not neutral – not in the abstract philosophical sense that everyone agrees with and then promptly ignores, but in a harder, structural sense. Every AI system embeds choices about what it measures, what it ignores, what it optimises for, and how it classifies people. The values of those who designed it, funded it, and trained it on data are baked in. Calling a system objective does not make it objective. It just conceals whose objectivity you’re dealing with.

This matters enormously for governance. And it leads directly to the encyclical’s first major practical argument.

When consequential decisions – about credit, employment, parole, access to services – get delegated to automated systems, who actually answers for a wrong outcome? The Pope’s answer is: increasingly, no one. The injustice gets “cloaked in a veneer of neutrality and objectivity, against which it becomes difficult to raise objections.” Political responsibility dissolves along with the human face of the decision. His demand in response is simple: algorithmic decisions that affect people’s lives must be transparent, contestable, and subject to genuine human oversight. That is not radical. It is, essentially, the position of the EU AI Act. But it is worth having it stated with this much force.

The second major argument is about power concentration. This is where I think Leo XIV is at his sharpest. He extends a traditional Catholic concept – the “universal destination of goods,” the idea that the earth’s resources belong in some meaningful sense to the whole human family – to cover data, algorithms, patents, and digital infrastructure. Data is produced by many contributors, he says. It cannot be treated as private property to be monopolised by a handful of actors. And right now, those actors are setting the conditions of public life: what is visible, what gets amplified, who gets rewarded, who gets penalised. They are doing this at a scale that exceeds the reach of most democratic institutions. It needs to be named plainly, and he does.

Now, where the encyclical gets distinctively Catholic – and where it will be most interesting to people wrestling with the deeper questions AI raises – is in its account of human limitation.

Leo XIV takes direct aim at transhumanism and posthumanism: the dream of transcending human weakness through technology. His response is not simply “that’s playing God.” It’s more interesting than that. Human limitation, he argues, is not a defect to be corrected. It is the condition under which compassion, wisdom, and genuine relationship become possible. Suffering, failure, vulnerability – these are the crucible in which character forms. He quotes Viktor Frankl on Auschwitz to make the point: the same humanity capable of the gas chambers was capable of entering them upright, with a prayer on its lips. Our greatness and our woundedness are inseparable. You cannot optimise away the second without losing the first.

This results in a critique of a particular promise that runs through a great deal of AI promotion: the implicit suggestion that human messiness, error, and uncertainty are problems to be solved rather than dimensions of a life to be lived. An algorithm treats failure as a flaw to be corrected. For a person, failure can be the beginning of real change. That distinction is worth holding onto.

So what does all this mean in practice? Leo XIV works through three domains: truth, work, and freedom.

On truth: AI amplifies disinformation at a scale and speed with no precedent. I have been involved in technology for over four decades, and I have never seen change occur so rapidly. That said, the Pope is not calling for censorship or centralised control – he explicitly argues against that. What he wants is what he calls an “ecology of communication”: strong journalism, transparent content governance, and a cultural commitment to treating truth as a common good rather than a weapon. He quotes Hannah Arendt on totalitarianism – its ideal subjects are not the ideologically convinced but those for whom “the distinction between fact and fiction no longer exists.” That is, obviously, the direction some of this is heading.

On work: automation and AI are displacing workers at speed, de-skilling those who remain, and subjecting them to algorithmic surveillance. The Church’s position since 1891 has been that work is not merely a means of income; it is constitutive of human dignity. Leo XIV holds that line and draws a direct practical implication: every deployment of automation must come with verifiable protections for the workers it affects. Profit cannot be the only measure. Employment is not a by-product of a well-functioning economy – it is a condition of one.

Here is one point where I would perhaps argue that a universal basic income, a significantly shorter definition of what constitutes full-time employment, or perhaps a combination of both, are also viable approaches to addressing this problem.

On freedom: the “attention economy” is not a neutral side-effect of digital business models. It is a system deliberately engineered to exploit psychological vulnerability for commercial gain. The Pope calls it what it is: a structural injustice, particularly when it targets children. He wants legal protections. So do I, for what it’s worth.

Leo XIV’s phrase for all of this is “disarming AI” – freeing it from the logic of geopolitical and commercial arms races, opening it to democratic debate, and making it genuinely accessible rather than controlled by whoever currently runs the data centres. Regulation alone will not do it. The deeper move requires treating AI as something that belongs to all of us, not just to those with the infrastructure to run it.

You don’t have to share his theology to see that this argument is both serious and urgent. Whether it goes anywhere is another question entirely.

But it should.

Before that, building a graphical application for Windows meant managing an event loop in code – a constant cycle in which your program checked what was happening in the operating system, decided which events it cared about, handled them, asked for a screen redraw, did the redrawing, and carefully released enough processing resources to let other programs continue running. To say it was complex is an understatement. Iterative interface design – trying something, seeing how it felt, adjusting – was genuinely difficult. VB changed all of that. It made GUI development accessible in a way that nothing had before.

I evangelised it to every developer I knew. Most of them couldn’t see it yet. They came around.

But it wasn’t all good. VB’s accessibility attracted less expert programmers and non-programmers who had dabbled in Basic on a home PC. Much of what followed was a mess. Business logic became deeply entangled with visual components. Software was shipped without adequate testing – automated testing of GUI applications was poorly understood, and the people building in VB often weren’t experienced enough to know what they didn’t know. An old industry adage proved itself, repeatedly: you can write COBOL in any language. The tool changes. The thinking required to use it well does not.

I have been watching the current conversation about AI and software development with a strong sense of familiarity.

The phenomenon has acquired a name vibe coding – which captures it well: using an AI assistant to generate code through conversation, iterating on the output, shipping the result. The parallels with the VB moment are not subtle. A technology arrives that makes programming accessible to people who couldn’t previously do it, and dramatically accelerates the work of people who could. The coverage is enthusiastic. The evangelists are out in force. The consequences that nobody is quite ready to discuss are already accumulating.

Let me be honest about both sides.

What genuinely changes is real. The speed at which an experienced developer can implement well-understood functionality has increased substantially. Boilerplate, routine integrations, the first draft of a feature – AI handles these faster than any human. For personal projects and small-scale tools, vibe coding works: if something goes wrong, the person who built it is close enough to notice and fix it. The barrier to building software has lowered again, and some of what gets built at that lower barrier is genuinely useful.

What doesn’t change is more important.

The else clause doesn’t care how the code was generated. I wrote recently about the moment a developer implementing a payment feature types the word “else” and stops – confronted by the cascade of questions that only become visible at the point of implementation. What happens when the payment gateway times out? When the card is declined for one of several distinct reasons? When the payment succeeds but the confirmation email fails? None of those questions are in the AI prompt. They are only visible from close range, and answering them requires judgment that the AI does not have and the vibe coder may not have either. For a personal project, an unhandled edge case is an inconvenience. For a system handling real transactions for real customers, it is something else entirely.

The belief that design is now optional is gaining traction in places that should know better. The idea that you can describe what you want in conversation with an AI and deploy the result – without thinking through requirements, failure modes, or any of the work that precedes responsible implementation – does not work for software of any significance. The AI will generate something. It will often look plausible. What it will not do is tell you what you forgot to ask for.

The consequences for professional developers are serious and largely absent from the coverage. Senior developers – whose job has always included reviewing and correcting the work of more junior colleagues – are now contending with code being generated at a pace no review process was designed to handle. The volume is extraordinary. The quality varies enormously. Seniors are increasingly seen as the bottleneck in the “construction” of software, are being pushed to review faster, and are burning out. This is not a hypothetical. It is happening now, in organisations that have adopted AI coding tools without thinking through what happens to the humans in the loop.

And then there is the question I find most troubling.

Junior developers learn to become senior developers by encountering problems. The obtuse error message that takes two days to diagnose and turns out to be a network configuration issue on one specific server. The unexpected interaction between two libraries that produces behaviour nobody anticipated. The edge case that only surfaces under load, at 2am, in production. These encounters are not inefficiencies to be optimised away. They are the education. A junior developer who generates code through an AI assistant and ships it without deeply understanding what it does is not building the judgment that the industry will need from them in ten years.

So. What changes?

The speed at which you can build the wrong thing increases dramatically. The thinking required to build the right thing does not. And the people the industry will need to do that thinking – experienced enough to know what questions the AI isn’t asking – are burning out at the senior end and failing to develop at the junior end.

Nobody seems to be treating that as the emergency it is.

My parents didn’t bring a life with them from Greece. They met in the suburbs of 1950s Melbourne and decided to build one from scratch. My father was a man of the factory floor; my mother, a woman of the needle and thread. They had arrived in Australia separately, with nothing but the kind of stubborn resilience that a village upbringing in Greece either forges or breaks. When they finally scraped together enough to buy their first home in Bank St, South Melbourne — then a low-price, worker’s suburb, not the trendy, up-market suburb it is today — they didn’t celebrate by spreading out. They celebrated by squeezing in.

I spent my childhood in a house where my parents, my sister, and I shared a single bedroom, while the rest of the house was a revolving door of new arrivals – young men, women, and families who had stepped off a boat with a cardboard suitcase and a look of profound displacement. Rent wasn’t a monthly transaction. You didn’t pay a cent until you found a job, and you didn’t leave until you’d saved enough to buy a front door of your own.

The air in our shared kitchen was thick with roasted lamb, Greek tobacco, and the collective anxiety of people trying to learn a new syntax for home. By modern council codes, the arrangements would probably be condemned. In practice, it was the most efficient social safety net ever designed. My parents understood something my generation has largely forgotten: a house isn’t a private sanctuary or a diversified asset. It’s a lifeboat. And in a lifeboat, you don’t complain about the lack of legroom. You keep pulling people out of the water.

The rhythm of that house was the hum of my mother’s sewing machine. My father’s hands were stained with factory grease; my mother’s back was permanently shaped by hours bent over her work. They were workers in the most literal sense – trading their physical stamina for a foothold in a country that didn’t always know what to do with them. But their labour didn’t end when they clocked off. The second shift began at the kitchen table.

This was where the unwritten contract of the Greek community was signed. They helped the newcomers navigate the terrifying bureaucracy of a new country, translated documents they barely understood themselves, walked people into the factory and vouched for them by name. They weren’t just providing a bed. They were providing a bridge.

Some of those strangers who occupied the back rooms of our house never really left our lives. They became the fabric of our family – there for the christenings, the funerals, and dancing the most enthusiastically at my wedding. The guest list that day wasn’t just a collection of relatives. It was a map of my parents’ generosity. Several of the people there had spent their first night in Australia on a makeshift bed in our dining room.

My parents didn’t have degrees in sociology. But they understood what I think of as ancestral mathematics: you don’t subtract from your life by adding someone else to your dinner table. You multiply your security. True resilience is communal. If the factory closed or the sewing commissions dried up, their house wouldn’t fall – because it was held up by the dozens of people they had once sheltered.

I look at the way we live now – the clean, quiet streets, the high fences, the video doorbell that lets me check whether I can afford to ignore whoever is knocking – and I see clearly what we bought with our success.

We bought silence.

We’ve outsourced our safety nets to insurance companies and superannuation funds. We have apps for delivery so we don’t have to talk to shopkeepers. We’ve learned to call “not wanting to help” by the more comfortable name of “setting boundaries.” We treat the house as a box that accrues value while we sit inside it, scrolling. My parents treated it as a machine for producing successful citizens.

I’m not suggesting we go back to four families sharing one bathroom. We’ve earned our bedrooms and our privacy, and I for one intend to keep them. But I think we need to remember the spirit of that shared kitchen. The most valuable thing you can do with a spare room – whether it’s physical, financial, or simply a pocket of time you’ve kept for yourself – is to put someone in it until they can stand on their own two feet.

My parents arrived with nothing. They left a legacy of full rooms.

I hope my generation doesn’t end up with everything, only to realise we’re the only ones in the house.

Everyone in the room has seen this chart before. The developers have seen it many times. They are looking at it now with the particular expression of people who have learned, through painful experience, that pointing out the obvious is rarely worth the political capital it costs.

The chart is fiction. Everyone in the room knows it is fiction. The meeting will proceed as though it is not.

This scene plays out, with only minor variations, in organisations everywhere, every day. I have been in that room more times than I care to count, on both sides of the table. After forty-five years in the industry, I have come to believe that the thinking buried inside that chart — a mental model so pervasive that most people have never stopped to question it — is responsible for more wasted money, more broken working relationships, and more sheer human misery than any other single factor in the history of software development.

That is a large claim. Let me make the case for it.

The mental model goes like this: software development is fundamentally similar to building construction. You gather your requirements — the architect’s drawings — produce a detailed design, and then hand it to a team of developers who build the thing according to the plan. The building part is where the time and money go. The rest is just planning.

This feels intuitive. It satisfies the finance department’s need for a budget. It gives management something to approve and something to hold people accountable to. It maps neatly onto every other capital project an organisation might undertake. And it is wrong. Not approximately wrong, not wrong in ways that better tools might correct. Fundamentally, structurally wrong — because software development is not construction. It is design, all the way down, and design does not work the way construction does.

In construction, an architect can specify a building in sufficient detail that a crew can build it without constantly referring back for decisions. The materials behave predictably. The edge cases have been resolved by generations of previous builders. None of this is true in software. The domain is almost always novel — if it weren’t, you’d buy existing software rather than building new software. The technologies change constantly. And the edge cases cannot be fully enumerated by anyone sitting in a room writing a requirements document. They can only be discovered by building the system and watching what happens.

Consider a developer implementing an online payment feature. The requirements describe the happy path clearly: the user enters their card details, the payment is processed, the order is confirmed. Straightforward. Then the developer types the word “else” — the part of the code that handles what happens when things don’t go as expected — and stops.

Is a payment gateway timeout the same as a declined card? Should the system retry, and how many times? Is an expired card the same message as a stolen card? If the payment succeeds but the confirmation email fails, has the order been placed? If the user tries again, will they be charged twice? None of these questions are in the requirements document. They couldn’t be — they only become visible from the point in the implementation where you are close enough to the actual behaviour of the system to see them. The requirements described what the feature should do when it works. They said almost nothing about what it should do when it doesn’t, because you can only enumerate those cases by building the thing. This is not a planning failure. It is the normal, expected, entirely routine operation of software development. Every significant feature has its else clause. The Gantt chart has no column for it.

The software industry tried to solve this, twice. The first attempt was the waterfall methodology — named for its diagram showing project phases flowing downward in sequence, each completing before the next begins — which crystallised through the 1970s as the discipline’s answer to the chaos of early software projects. It looked like engineering. It produced documents management could review and approve. It gave finance a basis for budgeting. And it failed, consistently and expensively, for exactly the reasons described above: it was built on the assumption that you could know everything that mattered before you started building, which you cannot.

By the late 1990s there was enough wreckage from waterfall projects to generate serious dissatisfaction. Out of that came the Agile Manifesto of 2001 — a short document signed by seventeen developers who had gathered to articulate what a better approach might look like. It is worth reading if you haven’t. It values individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Working software over comprehensive documentation. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. Responding to change over following a plan. Not one of those values mentions two-week sprints, or daily standups, or story points, or velocity charts.

What most organisations adopted in the name of agile was a project management framework. Which is a different thing entirely. A sprint is just a short waterfall. A backlog is just a requirements document broken into smaller pieces. If the underlying assumption is still that software can be planned, estimated, and tracked like a construction project, changing the vocabulary and the cadence changes nothing fundamental. What you get instead is what practitioners have taken to calling “agile theatre”: the team holds its standups, the Scrum Master facilitates the retrospective, and meanwhile, somewhere above all of this, a senior manager has a spreadsheet with a delivery date committed to before the first sprint began, derived from an estimate produced before anyone wrote a line of code. The ceremonies continue. The date does not move.

I have written elsewhere about what happens when someone gives an honest estimate in this environment. It tends not to go well for them.

So why does the fiction persist? Because it is useful. Not useful for building good software — fifty years of evidence is unambiguous on that. Useful for conducting business in a way that feels manageable to everyone involved.

Consider the position of a large consulting firm bidding for a software contract. The client wants a fixed price and a guaranteed delivery date. The honest response — that both are unavailable at this stage, because the full scope of what will be required cannot be known until a substantial portion of the work is done — tends not to win contracts. The response that wins is a confident number and a confident date, underwritten by a methodology impressive enough to make both look credible. The firm that gives the honest answer loses the work. The firm that gives the confident answer wins it, and then has years of billing ahead regardless of whether the project succeeds, because extracting a large consulting organisation from an in-progress project is itself a significant undertaking. This is not a description of dishonest behaviour. It is a description of incentives that systematically reward the perpetuation of a false mental model.

The cost of those incentives is not abstract. I worked with a developer early in my career — talented, conscientious, someone who genuinely cared about the quality of what she built — who spent eighteen months on a government project contracted on a fixed-price, fixed-scope basis, with a scope that had been defined before anyone wrote a line of code. By month twelve she was working weekends routinely. By month eighteen the system had been delivered — late, incomplete in the ways that the contract did not technically require to be complete — and she left the industry shortly afterward. She had been in it for four years.

I have seen versions of that story more times than I care to count. The details change. The structure doesn’t. A commitment is made before the necessary information exists to make it responsibly. Everyone downstream absorbs the consequences.

The Gantt chart on the screen is not the problem. It is a symptom. The problem is a fifty-year-old mental model that the people funding software projects find too useful to give up, and that the people building software projects have learned it is not worth their careers to challenge.

That is not where you want to be. And it is exactly where most organisations are.

My book, Code Is Design, goes into this topic in a way that is accessible to both the technical people and those that are managing or underwriting software development projects.
It is available now on Amazon.

Let me back up.

My GP had been my doctor since I was a teenager — a little older than me, someone I thought of, and still think of, as a friend who happens to have a medical degree. After years of watching my weight trend upward through the fluctuations, he sat me down for a conversation of a different kind. Not the usual review of blood tests and medication adjustments. A proper one.

He said he understood that losing weight was hard. That the conventional advice — eat less, move more — was a gross oversimplification that failed to account for the reality of what my body was actually doing. He was not there to make me feel worse about what I had tried and not achieved. But he was also not going to let me leave without being clear about what the numbers were telling him. At 158 kilograms, carrying the metabolic load of advanced Type 2 diabetes, my life expectancy was, in his professional judgement, severely compromised.

Not a lecture. A fact, delivered with the directness of someone who cares enough about you to say the hard thing.

I asked him what else there was. He thought for a moment, then told me about a procedure beginning to produce notable results — new enough that he wanted to refer me to the leading practitioner rather than attempt to summarise it himself. The procedure he was talking about was laparoscopic adjustable gastric banding, or what is now commonly referred to as a lap band.

My wife and I did our research. We attended presentations. We spoke with people who had already had the procedure — early recipients, willing to answer questions from strangers about something deeply personal. The picture that emerged was honest about the trade-offs. Certain foods would cause problems. Meals out would carry a background level of anxiety, indefinitely. The band could not stop liquid calories, so the discipline still had to be there. It was a structural constraint, not a substitute for judgement.

None of this was disqualifying. But it required honest consideration, and we gave it that. Several months of it. Weighing the risks against the alternative. Sitting with the question of whether this was the right thing to do.

In the end, we decided to go ahead.

I remember lying on the hospital bed in the pre-surgery bay, in the standard-issue gown that hospital gowns have apparently been since the beginning of time, waiting to be taken through to theatre. Two orderlies arrived with a narrower wheeled trolley — the kind used to transfer patients into the operating room. One of them asked me to slide across.

The other stopped him, took him a few steps away, and said, in the tone of someone who doesn’t think they’re being overheard: patients over 150 kilograms cannot be transferred on the trolley.

I heard it. He didn’t intend me to, and there was nothing malicious in it — just a practical observation between two people doing their jobs. But I heard it.

They wheeled the hospital bed itself into the theatre instead.

I have thought about that moment many times in the years since. At the time it hit me with a force I hadn’t expected — a sudden, stark encounter with what I had become, delivered without commentary or judgement, which somehow made it worse. I made a decision in that moment, lying on that bed being wheeled through the corridor: I was going to do whatever it took. Whatever discomfort, whatever inconvenience, whatever the procedure demanded. I was going to get my weight under control. That was not negotiable any more.

That was probably the real turning point. Not the surgery. The moment before it.

The years that followed involved karate — which deserves its own post, and will get one — and a weight loss, over time, of around 60 kilograms. My insulin requirements dropped, then disappeared. The other medications followed. For six years I managed Type 2 diabetes on no medication at all. The disease is progressive, and it came back. But those six years happened, and they happened because of a decision made in a hospital corridor that nobody planned and nobody witnessed.

Here is what I want to say about that. We talk about decisions to change as though they are acts of will — as though the problem is simply that people haven’t decided hard enough yet. That has not been my experience. What actually moved me was not discipline. It was a moment of clarity, arrived at sideways, in a context I couldn’t have predicted. The orderly wasn’t trying to help me. He didn’t know he did.

And the other thing: at no point in this story did the answer turn out to be trying harder at what hadn’t worked. It turned out to be a medical intervention. Obesity is a disease. It responds to medical treatment. The fact that we spent decades treating it as a character flaw has cost a great deal — in suffering, in shortened lives, in patients told to try harder at things that were never going to be sufficient.

I was one of those patients. For a long time.

Next week, Ground Truth moves on to another topic. If you are interested in reading more about my story dealing with diabetes, my book “The Long Road Down” is a first-hand account of what 30 years living with Type 2 diabetes is like. It is available now on Amazon.

I write about my own experience managing Type 2 diabetes — thirty-plus years of it. None of this is medical advice. Your situation is not my situation, and nothing here should be a reason to change your treatment without talking to your doctor first.

Let me back up.

I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes in 1994, aged thirty-five. The diagnosis arrived at the end of a day when I had fallen asleep on the office sofa and woken six hours later to my wife’s increasingly non-negotiable phone calls. I went from the GP’s surgery directly to hospital. That was the beginning of a management relationship with the disease that has now lasted more than thirty years — through insulin injections, through a lap band procedure, through karate, through six years off all medication, followed by the slow, humbling return of the disease in its progressive form. I know this disease. I know its rhythms, its responses, its particular habit of ignoring things you try on it.

Three years ago, my endocrinologist added Ozempic to my regimen. Not for weight loss. For blood glucose management. It works on a hormone pathway that stimulates insulin production in response to meals, among other things, and for someone managing advanced, long-standing Type 2 diabetes, it is genuinely effective for that purpose. That is why I am on it. Weight loss was never the goal.

Good. Now let me tell you what the coverage doesn’t.

Ozempic has side effects. The medical literature acknowledges this in careful, measured language — “gastrointestinal effects,” “abdominal discomfort” — as though it were describing mild inconveniences. What the literature does not convey, and what no celebrity profile of the drug has mentioned, is the particular social texture of those effects. The flatulence is persistent, loud, and largely indifferent to social context. The belching is similarly uninvited. The stomach noises — a deep, rolling interior gurgling — have announced themselves in meetings. They have interrupted conversations. They have no sense of occasion whatsoever.

I say this not to be indelicate but because people deserve accurate information before they start. I have had to become strategic about positioning in rooms. That is a sentence I never expected to write.

There is also fatigue, particularly in the days immediately after injection. Not incapacitating, but present — a heaviness I have learned to plan around. And injection site reactions: the occasional lump, the lingering tenderness. For someone who already administers a nightly insulin injection, a weekly subcutaneous shot is not an unfamiliar experience — but it adds to the accounting. This is the pharmacological management of a chronic disease. It is not glamorous. Nobody is writing long profiles of what that part feels like.

Now. The weight.

Over three years on Ozempic, I have lost approximately five kilograms. I am not entirely convinced the drug deserves credit for all of it. Here is why. My wife and I spend three months of every year in Greece. In Greece, I reliably lose around two kilograms — better food, more walking, lower stress, Mediterranean everything. In Australia, on the same drug, same dose, same treatment regimen, I do not lose weight. Or not anything measurable beyond ordinary fluctuation.

My endocrinologist has views about this — olive oil and insulin sensitivity feature prominently — and I find the explanations plausible. But I cannot fully explain it, and I am wary of anyone who claims they can. What I know is that the drug the headlines have called transformative has, in my experience, not produced the transformation the headlines describe. It is doing something useful. Weight loss is not the primary thing it is doing.

Perhaps the pharmaceutical companies should stop trying to synthesise the molecule and start trying to synthesise a month in a Greek village. It is, in my experience, the only thing that actually moves the needle for me.

Now. The supply shortage.

For roughly two years — and the memory is still fresh enough to sting — obtaining Ozempic required persistence. Multiple calls to multiple pharmacies. Occasional failure. Occasional expensive workarounds. The supply had been overwhelmed by off-label demand: people without diabetes, prescribed it for weight loss.

I want to be careful here, because I believe obesity is a real disease. Not a character flaw, not a failure of willpower, not something that better choices would simply fix. A genuine medical condition with complex metabolic, genetic, and environmental drivers, and one that deserves to be treated with the same seriousness we extend to any other chronic illness. That is not a pro forma disclaimer. I mean it.

But there is a prioritisation question that nobody seemed particularly interested in asking. When patients using a drug for glycaemic control — patients for whom it is not a lifestyle intervention but a component of managing a serious, progressive condition — cannot reliably obtain it, something has gone wrong with how we’ve allocated access. The market found its equilibrium eventually. The supply situation has largely resolved. But the conversation about who bore the cost during those two years, and whether that was acceptable, has never really happened.

That is the story you do not read. Not because it is hidden. Because the people writing about Ozempic are not the people who were on it before it became famous, and the patients for whom it is simply the latest chapter in a very long story have not been given much column space.

I keep reading the coverage looking for something that resembles my experience. I am still looking.

I write about my own experience managing Type 2 diabetes — thirty-plus years of it. None of this is medical advice. Your situation is not my situation, and nothing here should be a reason to change your treatment without talking to your doctor first.

We were a small software house — I was CTO — and we had built something worth having: a finance origination platform that we white-labelled and customised for clients in a specialised industry. Each implementation meant taking the core system and shaping it around how a particular client operated: their product structures, their incentive arrangements, their promotions, all layered on top of the financial and accounting requirements that the law doesn’t negotiate on. We were good at it. We were building a reputation. And one of the largest players in the industry took notice.

They sent us an RFP. Attached to it was a requirement that we found rather more interesting than the specifications: the work had to be complete within six months of engagement.

This was a David and Goliath situation — they were that much larger than we were — and our CEO very much wanted to land them. I very much did not want to respond at all. The requirements document was a mixed bag of incompatible specifications, and when we asked questions, the answers were uninformative and faintly annoyed, as though the questions themselves were an impertinence.

We responded anyway. Our honest estimate broke into two phases: two months of white-labelling running concurrently with one month of requirements clarification, followed by a second engagement for the remaining customisation work — somewhere between six and ten months, depending on how the conflicting requirements resolved and how complex the integration with their general ledger system turned out to be. Eight to twelve elapsed months in total. We couldn’t be more specific than that. Nobody could, honestly, at that stage.

In the process of preparing the bid, I had got to know one of their staff. We weren’t friends — more like two people who had recognised something in each other across a table. We both understood what was actually happening: that any estimate submitted in response to this RFP was a guess at best and pure fiction at worst. He knew it. I knew it. The difference was that I was writing mine down honestly.

At our end-of-year company picnic, the CEO told me we hadn’t got it. I stepped aside and called my contact at the other firm. He let slip — probably more than he should have — that we’d been rejected because we couldn’t commit to six months. The successful applicant, a large offshore consulting firm, had committed to the timeline and come in at roughly the same price.

Our CEO was crestfallen. Our development team, when I told them, reacted the way I had: with quiet, private relief. There is something clarifying about losing work you didn’t want.

Three years or so later, I ran into that same contact at a conference. About agile development, as it happens. He had moved on to another company but was still in touch with people at his old firm. Over a beer — low-carbohydrate, given my circumstances — he told me what had happened. The project had run for a little over two years. It had cost approximately three times what we had proposed. It had been scrapped. They were going out for new proposals.

Were we invited to respond this time?

We were not. Either they were too embarrassed — unlikely — or they were still looking for someone to tell them what they wanted to hear.

I hope they found them.

This story is one instance of a general pattern — an industry built on a mental model that everyone in the room knows is wrong. I’ve made the full case in Code is Design. It turned out to need a book rather than an essay.

These are posts about places: a particular stretch of road in the Peloponnese where history turned on a single morning, or the quarter of Athens where refugees from Smyrna settled after 1922 and changed Greek music forever. History, culture, the meaning that accumulates in places over centuries. The kind of thing that takes a while to explain properly.

That instinct — to not stop before the idea is actually clear — has been with me since the beginning.

In the late 1970s, I was so shy that having to address five people in a room would cause me to break out in a cold sweat. I’d start a sentence and lose the thread before I’d finished it. Clearly, this was not going to work. So I did something deliberate: I volunteered to teach the introductory sessions of the commercial programming course I had just completed. Evening classes, four weeks. I knew the material cold, which meant I could use the energy I would otherwise have spent on panic to work on exactly one thing: learning how to talk to a room.

It worked. Within a few years I was presenting at major conferences. When Microsoft launched VB5, they sent me around Australia to present to audiences of thousands. When Borland released Delphi, I did the same across Australia and New Zealand. I wrote a monthly column for a technical publication. A major publisher approached me about writing a book — and I didn’t pursue it, for reasons that made sense at the time. I’ve spent the years since regretting it.

Last month, I finally wrote the book. *Code Is Design* is about why software projects fail — which turns out to be about a fundamental misunderstanding of what software development actually is. Writing it confirmed something I already knew: I still have things to say, and I’m still not finished saying them.

So. Ground Truth.

The name means what it says. We are living through a period in which facts are being systematically contested, weaponised, and replaced with narratives designed to divide. I am watching the contempt for expertise — the manufactured grievance, the tribal loyalty test, the aggressive denial of observable reality — emerge in Australian public life in ways that would have seemed extraordinary ten years ago. I have children who are working harder than my wife and I ever had to, for less security. I have grandchildren who will inherit whatever world we leave for them.

I am not a political commentator and I have no interest in becoming one. But I’ve spent forty-five years in an industry that runs on whether you’re willing to tell people what you actually think rather than what they want to hear — and I’ve come to believe that clear, honest explanation from someone who has actually done something is in shorter supply than it should be.

Ground Truth will cover technology and organisations, because that’s where I’ve spent most of my working life. It will cover health, because thirty years of managing Type 2 diabetes has given me a perspective I didn’t ask for and won’t waste. It will cover Greek-Australian life, history, and identity, because that’s where I come from and it is underwritten in the broader culture in ways that deserve more attention than they get. And it will cover whatever else demands attention.

One post a week. Honest, I hope. Occasionally long.

My wife has been warned.