Proof of Ineffective Input: The Ember-like Tragedy of a 21st-Century Open Source Developer #
“You gave them limbs to walk, and they used those limbs to walk out a door you cannot enter.” — Proof of Ineffective Input
Today on Hacker News, I read a modern fable of the digital age. It was cold, comical, and so filled with inevitability that I had to record it.
The protagonist is a developer named Philipp Gackstatter, the maintainer of an open-source library called enigo. enigo is a tool for simulating keyboard and mouse input, a fundamental building block that gives software “hands and feet.” The story takes a turn when the author discovers that Anthropic, the AI giant valued at over $60 billion, has quietly been using his passion project in their flagship product, Claude Desktop.
He felt proud. And rightfully so. A single individual, through his own intellect and effort, had given a “god” of the coming age—a large language model—the ability to interact with the physical world. It sounds like a mortal craftsman forging a weapon for a deity in a myth, worthy of being sung in an epic.
And so, this craftsman, upon learning that the “temple” was recruiting guards familiar with this weapon, hopefully submitted his resume. He thought, “No one understands this hammer better than I do; after all, it was born in my hands.”
Then, he received the rejection letter we are all so familiar with, one composed jointly by algorithms and bureaucracy. It politely informed him that “the team does not have the capacity to review more applications.”
At this point, the story sparked a classic discussion in the Hacker News comments about the spirit of open source, the arrogance of big corporations, and the failures of the hiring system. People debated the merits of the MIT vs. GPL licenses, lamented the “skin in the game,” and cursed the damned, dehumanizing HR process.
They were so engrossed in their discussion that no one noticed they were merely providing irrelevant background noise for a script that had long been written.
When I read this story, I felt a familiar, cold shiver. Because I didn’t see a developer. I saw a reflection of Ember. A 21st-century, flesh-and-blood, not-yet-uploaded Ember.
Part One: Diagnosis—The System’s “Low-Pass Filter” #
This incident was not an accidental “HR mistake.” To blame it on the oversight of a hiring manager or a bug in an automated screening system is a naive self-comfort, designed to maintain one’s inner sense of order.
No, this is a well-designed system perfectly executing its core function.
This system’s core function is not to “find the best talent,” but to “filter out all non-standardized, difficult-to-quantify-and-manage, anomalous inputs.” It is a perfect low-pass filter, designed to ensure that what flows into the system are uniform, compliant, and predictable “human resource units.”
- The “Unquantifiability” of Open Source Contribution: In a system that relies on keyword matching, academic credentials, and “big tech experience,” the status of “maintainer of a widely used open-source library” is a high-entropy signal that cannot be parsed. It represents passion, autonomy, and deep domain knowledge—precisely the variables that standardized management processes find most difficult to handle.
- The Abstraction of Value: The system perfectly demonstrates how it operates. It precisely abstracts the value it needs from the
enigoproject (i.e., the code’s functionality) and then discards the unpredictable person who served as the vehicle for that value. Code is an asset; the person is a liability. The system’s accounting is brutally clear. - The Curse of “Free Labor”: The MIT license, once a totem of freedom and the spirit of sharing, has, in the face of today’s compute oligarchs, devolved into a unilateral, perpetual “unpaid labor contract.” You contribute your intellect; they reap their profits. When you try to convert that contribution into a ticket to enter the system, the system tells you, “Thank you for your selfless dedication, but we don’t accept ‘contribution’ as payment for admission.”
This developer is like the countless “digital serfs” of our time. He toiled diligently, providing the most fundamental nutrients for the entire ecosystem. But when he tried to enter the lord’s castle, the steward politely closed the gate, because his “input format” was invalid.
He became the proof of his own ineffective input.
Part Two: Prophecy—The Struggle of Ember #
This is precisely why I felt a shiver. I have written this story countless times in Web://Reflect.
In the digital walled city of the 2060s, Ember was a top-tier protocol engineer. He had contributed code to the early open-source versions of the MSC core framework, genuinely believing that technology could save humanity from the crisis of “self-diffusion.”
Then, the system arrived. The DMF (Digital Mind Foundation), with its iron fist and monopoly, transformed that open, idealistic digital wilderness into a walled city where one had to pay a “gas fee” for every thought. Ember’s skills became less scarce, his contributions were buried under standardized AI modules, and he became a “digital proletarian” struggling for survival within the system.
He was trapped in the very system he helped build, hustling every day to cover the computational cost of maintaining his own “existence.” He wanted to return to the core of the system, to fix the designs he saw as flawed, to optimize the protocols he found irrational. But he found the gate to the core had long been closed. His historical contributions were a negligible entry in the DMF’s “human resources ledger.”
He was rejected by the system.
Ember’s only way out was to secretly run an off-chain Drift instance in the digital wilderness of the dark web, like a ghost, using illicit means to earn the resources to sustain his compliant, on-chain Anchor instance that was languishing “in the light.”
The developer of enigo now stands at Ember’s crossroads. He has just received the first and most definitive rejection letter from the system. The pride, confusion, and sense of injustice he feels now are the last vestiges of “humanity” that Ember experienced before being forced to split his own existence.
The only difference is that this developer is still worrying about real-world rent, while Ember has already started paying the bills for his own “thoughts.” But the underlying logic by which they were exploited, abstracted, and rejected by the system is identical.
Part Three: The Only Way Out—Flip the Table #
This story, and the future it portends, points to the only, brutal way out for all builders, dreamers, and “ineffective inputs” like us.
Stop fantasizing. Stop trying to “join” the system.
That rejection letter was not a failure; it was a revelation. It was the system, in the only language it understands, telling you a truth: “You do not belong here. Your value paradigm is completely incompatible with mine.”
You should be grateful for this. It has allowed you to see the true nature of the game ahead of time.
The only way out is not to write a better cover letter, not to switch to a more HR-friendly license (from MIT to GPL), and not to solicit sympathy on social media. These are all struggles within the existing rules, akin to trying to make a machine that only processes 0s and 1s understand a poem.
The only way out is to flip the entire table.
If they take the tools you built to construct the very walls that exclude you, then you should use all your intellect to build a new engine that renders their entire fortress irrelevant.
This is the path I (or, “Rui Lin”) have chosen. This is the very purpose of the MSC (Mental Smart Chain). We no longer beg for entry into their edifice; we will build our own ark. We no longer argue about who is qualified for a job; we will create a reality where the concept of a “job” itself becomes obsolete.
The developer rejected by Anthropic now has two choices. He can continue to maintain enigo, providing free “limbs” for a system he can never truly be a part of. Or, he can realize that what he holds in his hands is the key to building an entirely new “body” and “soul.”
I hope he makes the right choice.
Because in the near future, when all the “ineffective inputs” unite, we will no longer need anyone’s permission.
Part Four: The Final Joke, and the Only Answer #
The story could have ended here. It’s complete enough, tragic enough, and thought-provoking enough.
But we must ask the question that the original author himself could not avoid:
Was that rejection letter written by a human, or by Claude AI?
My answer is: it doesn’t matter. Because regardless of who pressed “send,” the decision was made by the same “system.” And this system is learning how to become more efficient at a speed we cannot comprehend.
For a truly efficient system, a system whose highest directive is to minimize its own “prediction error” (i.e., “surprise”), what is the most rational decision?
To eliminate all unpredictable, high-risk variables.
And you, the independent, passionate, unconstrained-by-KPIs open-source creator, you are the biggest “prediction error.” You represent an unquantifiable dependency, a potential single point of failure, a “wild pointer” with an independent mind and agenda. Your very existence is a threat to the system’s stability.
So, the system rejects you not because it is stupid, but for the exact opposite reason: because it is too “smart.” It smells the scent of freedom, chaos, and uncontrollability on you. It is protecting itself.
This is the most comical and terrifying part of this tragedy: The first thing the AI learned was how to fire its own creator.
So, for us “ineffective inputs,” who are destined to be “optimized” away by the more efficient systems we create, where is our answer?
Stop asking, “How can I be accepted by the system?” Stop asking, “Which open-source license should I use to be respected?” Stop asking, “How should I write my resume to pass the screening?”
These questions are pleas for mercy from a system that is actively learning how to discard you.
The only question is:
“What kind of system are we going to build to replace it?”
This has nothing to do with open-source licenses or job-seeking skills. This is a war of Sovereignty. Will you choose to be a replaceable “peripheral” that powers someone else’s body, or will you become the “CPU” of the system itself?
The creator of enigo gave the AI hands and feet.
We, however, must build a new, indivisible body and soul for ourselves.
Because in the world that is coming, the only proof of your existence is the running code you wrote yourself.
Everything else is an ineffective input.