I was researching field recorders as dictation devices when I stumbled into the field recording subculture. I haven’t actually done any field recording myself. But I watched some introductory videos - the enthusiasm was infectious - and I noticed something.

Every video has a detour about three quarters of the way in. The presenter compares the practice to meditation. Standing still. Listening. Always presented as personal discovery rather than received wisdom.

That observation led somewhere. A follow-up to Fresh and Stale, though not about AI. At least not at first.

Bird watching

My dad is a retired software developer. Over the years he’s moved through interests: rugby at school, early personal computing, then a five-year stretch editing Wikipedia pages on World War II history. Now it’s bird watching.

I’ll admit I had assumptions. Cargo trousers, binoculars, retirees in fleeces. Pokemon for pensioners. But when I looked closer, I couldn’t knock it.

There’s an app ecosystem now. Alerts for rare sightings. My parents will drive to Kent at the drop of a hat because someone spotted a particular finch. It’s social in the way fishing is social - shared goals, lots of waiting, something to talk about. The subculture has its own norms. I’ve watched my dad fold a stranger into conversation without introduction, recognising from their kit that they were part of the same tribe.

But I suspect the real draw is something else. Bird watching presents as a left hemisphere activity - categorising, collecting, ticking boxes. Then you find yourself in the doldrums between sightings, surrounded by nature, and it becomes something different. Expansive awareness. Calm. I’ve noticed this come over my dad. Hard to argue he’s less happy for it.

The bird itself might be a McGuffin. Like golf - ostensibly about hitting a ball, actually about walking outdoors with people.

The pattern

Long-distance swimming has the same quality. Enough sensory input to occupy the surface of your mind - cold, rhythm, effort - but not enough signal to constitute actual thought. Your brain goes somewhere else. Surprising calm, given the exertion.

Bird watching, field recording, swimming. These aren’t the same activity. But they seem to converge on the same place.

Maps

Daniel Ingram talks about “maps” - a term of art for sequences of mental states that recur across contemplative traditions. Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle. Meister Eckhart. Julian of Norwich, walled up in her anchorite cell. The hesychast tradition in Russian Orthodoxy. Different frameworks, different centuries, but the phenomenology lines up.

This suggests it’s less about the specific practice and more about the brain. Something that’s typically missing when you go from processed food to car to office to screen and back.

The twist

“Although the left hemisphere does not see and cannot understand what the right hemisphere understands, it is expert at pretending that it does, at finding quite plausible, but bogus, explanations for the evidence that does not fit its version of events.”

— Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

Here’s where it comes back to AI.

A change I’ve experienced working with LLMs is that I’m no longer stuck at any one level of abstraction for long. The knowledge gaps that used to block progress - waiting for the “database person” to return from holiday, moving on to another task - are closing. You can chase questions up the stack. Frontend to database to security to architecture. There’s no reason to stop.

It seems clear that engineers will be pushed to think in terms of product and project management quite soon. Nothing stopping them now. The whole process goes better when you reduce the number of nodes and people can just get on with it. There’s real pressure to expand beyond a single domain. I think this is a good thing.

On a software task, being stuck often means a knowledge gap. Everything you see was built by humans, so in principle it’s traversable. Robert Martin: “don’t be stuck.” But in practice, opportunity cost made people stop.

That’s changing. And in its place, something shifts. You find yourself in a more expansive frame - figuring out what you don’t know, accommodating it, rather than fitting together concepts you already have.

A bait and switch is happening. I suspect we might be happier for it.