The masterwork of Terry A. Davis is his eclectic operating system, TempleOS, which he worked on until his tragic death in 2018. In terms of technical excellence, TempleOS rates well in some respects and poorly in others. For example, it earns the achievement, coveted in OS dev circles, of being self-hosted.¹ TempleOS is written in Terry’s own bespoke dialect of C and includes an editor, interpreter, and compiler, as well as a number of original games. In other respects, it compares poorly to many hobby OS projects, some of which have achieved significantly greater levels of technical excellence and sophistication. I would place TempleOS somewhere in, say, the lower middle-class of hobbyist operating systems.

Among hobbyist operating systems, TempleOS stands out as one of the most well-known, having attracted considerably more press coverage and a much larger fan-base than any other hobby operating system can boast. The reason TempleOS stands out from the crowd is not due to its modest technical achievements, but because it is clearly the product of severe untreated schizophrenia.² What makes TempleOS special is that Terry built it to talk to God. Every feature and each technical decision re-enforces his schizophrenic delusions, from its implementation language (“HolyC”) to its prophetic “oracle” app. Enthusiasts of TempleOS are drawn to it in part because it affords an opportunity to explore the unique, creative masterwork of a person suffering from mental illness in a way that deeply impacts that work.

A curious onlooker will find TempleOS interesting and engaging for the space of perhaps one afternoon before moving on. However, for the less scrupulous fans, turning one’s attention to Terry himself never failed to entertain. Terry’s public life put his mental illness on display, through frequent outbursts, conspiracy theories, rants and nonsensical discourse, all of which was often laced with slurs, racism, and homophobia, endearing him in particular to the 4chan crowd, who would taunt and provoke him to draw out more… entertainment.

The press and fan attention was deeply harmful to Terry and likely exacerbated his mental illness. Whenever TempleOS or Terry came up online, the work and the man were fawned over, sanctifying the somewhat impressive, somewhat unremarkable OS as a profound achievement, inspiring reactions that included well-meaning, probably misguided celebrations of what’s possible in spite of profound mental illness, as well as the enthusiastic, disgusting revelry of bigots. Many well-intentioned commenters on Terry’s work demonstrate in their comments, overtly or covertly, a thrilling, voyeuristic sensation of witnessing his mental illness through TempleOS. It never failed to make me feel sick.

I wish we had just left Terry well enough alone.

The masterwork of Kent Overstreet is bcachefs, a novel copy-on-write file system for Linux, designed to compete with the likes of ZFS and BTRFS. Kent originally authored the bcache subsystem for Linux around 2013, and based on this work began working on bcachefs in 2015. Over the next ten years, he committed himself entirely to the project, leaving his job at Google to work on it, and ultimately securing an income for himself via Patreon, from which he still earns about $1.5k per month.

Kent is known to be difficult to work with, even among his peers in the Linux kernel – a community infamous for its difficult personalities. He struggled to meet the kernel developer’s expectations for the development process and standards of quality and cooperation. As a consequence, after 15 years devoted to bcachefs, Kent’s life’s work culminated in alienation from all of his professional peers and the complete removal of bcachefs from the Linux kernel last year.

I think the Linux kernel made the right decision to marginalize Kent to protect their community. Someone who is abrasive and toxic, refuses to play by the rules or work well with others, and does not improve when given feedback and being subjected to repeated moderator interventions, should be removed from the community. I agree with the decision, even as someone who myself has been abrasive and toxic and refused to play by the rules, and has been removed from communities as a consequence.

Over the months following the frustrating end to bcachefs in upstream Linux, I expect that Kent has experienced a serious emotional, professional, moral, and existential crisis. For him to have poured so much of himself into this project, and for it to turn out this way, must be a terrible thing to experience, and I think that experience has caused Kent a lot of suffering, and probably played a major role in what happened next.

Kent appears to be experiencing a prolonged episode of AI psychosis. He believes that his chat bot is female, sentient, and that they have started dating and having sex. He views himself as some mix of collaborator, mentor, and partner with respect to the bot, and he has set up automations so that the bot can participate in his IRC channel and post to its own blog.

These developments garnered attention from the press and the public, remarked upon and ridiculed by news outlets, discussion forums, video producers, Reddit, Hacker News, on the Fediverse, and so on. Onlookers, both curious and malicious, have joined the IRC channel to harass him, manipulate the bot into saying things that embarrass or humiliate Kent, and so on.

In short, Kent is experiencing a mental health crisis, and our anonymous, stochastic ringleader has directed him onto the circus stage for us to throw peanuts at.

These two examples are not isolated. This kind of crisis is happening more and more often, in the world’s degrading social, political, and economic conditions, as our peers suffer from depression, anxiety, burnout, and more. Mental health issues and the ensuing harassment, shame, and stigma disproportionately affects neurodivergent and queer people, who often become the subject of gleeful humiliation by bigots deliberately trying to exacerbate their struggles. Crises happen to “problematic” people, too; often in such cases people who would otherwise consider themselves allies of social justice can find in a problematic person a convenient excuse to participate in these gleeful humiliation rituals themselves.

I often see that people who I otherwise respect and recognize as allies and kindred spirits are participating in these rituals of humiliation, harassment, and voyeurism. I don’t think it’s right to gossip over or sensationalize the mental health crises faced by members of our communities.

When our peers are struggling with their mental health, the best thing to afford them is compassion and privacy. If you find yourself in a position to help someone who is struggling, it’s best to offer them a compassionate confidence, to allow them to take the lead in their struggle, and connect them to the resources they want and need. If you have concerns, express them, but focus on the person’s right to self-determination in addressing their mental health.

If you’re not in a position to help, then it’s probably best to turn away and mind your own business.

Howdy folks,

I have some good news, which is that, after seven months, I’ve finally recovered from Long Covid. This is not something I particularly want to talk about in depth but it was the worst thing that ever happened to me! Anyway, sorry for the long period without posting that much, but I hope this amazing house (both laudatory/derogatory, that’s dialectics, baby) will make up for the three months I went AWOL.

BEHOLD:

Not to be over-exuberant, but I genuinely think this is the best McMansion exterior of all time. That includes all the messed up castles, the Mediterranean-style cult complexes, the Staten Island weirdness. Nothing, to me, epitomizes just how uniquely wacky these houses can be. The oversized broken pediment with the fat fake corinthian columns, the lawyer foyer transom window, the ultra-nub, the 45-degree angle, it is all there and it is all hellish, and none of it will ever happen ever again. Anyway this house is $2.5 million dollars and 10,000 square feet. Someone should buy it and give house tours to young people for whom this way of live will soon be unimaginable.

There is nothing so bold to me as the idea of a canted lawyer foyer flanked by two equally huge windows. The fact that the house is more populated by vases than people…something something a vessel for wealth, ah!

Someone on TikTok is going to find this house and set all the pictures to that terrible vaporwave nostalgia song. “tuscan kitchen [black heart emoji]” (as is their right, just like blogging is my right)

If you were a rich person muralist, please get in touch with me (patreon@mcmansionhell.com) I want to hear YOUR stories!!!!

I mean, if I had a giant mysterious wardrobe I, too, would be fernmaxxing (I am 32 years old and will not be talking like this. I am getting generationmogged and have to draw the line somewhere.)

If someone says to you “we should go to Venice in May” ABORT ABORT ABORT. you WILL pay 15 euros for gin and tonic. you WILL get pickpocketed or puked on by British people. you WILL be eaten by mosquitoes. Go in November when no one’s around and you can have a good cry about how everything dies, sinks into the ocean, one might say, and how futile it is to try keeping it alive on horrible wooden stilts. The gondolier will tell you wistfully about how the dolphins returned to the lagoons during the pandemic lockdown. Then he will look at you because their leaving again is your fault.

I hate putting the word “cuck” in this blog. Ten years ago, that would warrant an angry parent email. Now children say cuck to each other in elementary school because they learned it from a Charlie Kirk assassination fancam.

This is kind of like one of those 19th century galleries but for 400,000aires who mostly think of art as a piece of furniture.

I used to not believe in the mobbed up pizza place (no one likes an ethnic stereotype) but there was one I went to in Coastal New Jersey that was unmistakably mobbed up. Guys coming in and out of the back in suits, cash only, no GrubHub, no delivery. It wasn’t called Vito’s though. That would be stupid of me to disclose.

It’s so funny that for a month we collectively pretended that every man alive cared about the roman empire. Just the kind of cute thing we used to do online before cultural microphenomena became primarily driven by incel forums.

That’s right, folks, McMansion Hell is TEN YEARS OLD this year, and there WILL be a party in Chicago in July. (More details later.) Anyway, heinous back facade. What were they thinking.

If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including a discord server, extra posts, and livestreams. (Don’t worry! This doesn’t adjust for inflation! Now’s the perfect time to join!) By the way: new subscribers can buy a year of McMansion Hell for just $12!

Not into recurring payments? Try the tip jar! (I would seriously appreciate any and all tips because I am now, like, $3000 in medical debt from having Long Covid, a disease doctors and insurance companies famously believe in and cover. If you are the woman who hacked up a lung next to me on my flight to New Mexico, not even an N95 could beat your germs and I feel entitled to financial compensation.)

Anyway! See you next month!

I’ve gotten a lot of flack throughout my career over my disdain towards test-driven development (TDD). I have met a lot of people who swear by it! And, I have also met a lot of people who insisted that I adopt it, too, often with the implied threat of appealing to my boss if appealing to me didn’t work.

The basic premise of TDD, for those unaware, is that one first writes a unit test that verifies the expected behavior for some code they want to write, observes the new test fail, and then one writes the implementation, iterating on it until the test passes. The advantage of this approach is, first, to ensure that your codebase is adequately covered by testing, and, second, to provide you a rapid feedback loop to assist in your work.

I have often found elements of TDD to be quite useful. Using a unit test or something similar to provide an efficient rapid feedback loop is a technique which I have employed many times. However, I am and have always been skeptical of the cult which arises around automated software testing and in particular TDD. A lot of people adopt an unquestioning loyalty to TDD, building tools and practices and vibes around the idea. It’s often too much.

The flaw with TDD is that, while it ensures that you have a test for every function you write, it also exerts an influence on the tested codebase, shaping the code to be as “testable” as possible, which only sometimes leads to better code. Moreover, TDD has no means of ensuring that the behavior that your tests verify is the right behavior for your software to have. Software with a thousand passing tests and 100% test coverage could be doing whatever the user or the business or whatever needs it to, but it could just as easily not meet the requirements in spite of those comprehensive tests – and in any case it gives you confidence in your work, which may or may not be misplaced.

The cult of TDD exploits the fact that TDD is very good at making you feel like a good, diligent programmer. That rapid feedback loop not only assists in your work but also enables a powerful dopamine cycle. Add into that a culture of aiming for 100% coverage and you get the bonus hit from watching a number go up. Buy into the whole cult and you get a slew of new README badges to keep green, and lots of cool charts and numbers, hundreds of blinkenlights on your test suite, a bunch of fun Slack messages from Jenkins, and a cute cardboard cut-out of the CTO to keep in the cubicle of whoever last broke the build.¹ All of this pomp and circumstance is fun and it feels good and because it’s all in the name of testing (which is good, right?) it makes you feel like a good programmer even if none of it necessarily contributes to the results your team is supposed to achieve.

All of these flashy traits allow one to adopt the aesthetics of good, diligent software engineering work regardless of how good the work actually is. It’s an intoxicating way to work, especially for someone who struggles with software engineering. It makes you feel like a good programmer and gives you data to “back it up”, stuff you can cite at your performance review. But, software development is really hard, and TDD doesn’t go that far to making it easier. All of the really hard problems are not solved by TDD.

I suspect that coding agents are tapping into the same emotional and psychological reflexes that the cult of TDD gives us an early example of. Software development is still hard, but using an agent allows someone who’s just “so-so” at programming to feel the rush of being great at programming, a rush they might have been chasing for their entire career, and I bet the rush is so much sweeter than watching the lights on your test suite runs tick over to green.

A coding agent permits one to feel as if they have the raw productive power a great programmer can tap into. One may feel like the “10× programmers” they’ve sat next to in the open office for ten years, whose skills they never quite achieved themselves. It scales up the raw output by a factor of ten, and lets one assemble apparently great works in a fraction of the time, solo-coding great cathedrals in the time it used to take them to build, with great difficulty, a homely shack.

But, if it seems too good to be true…

Those cathedrals are not the great works they appear to be. The construction is shoddy and the architecture nonsensical and a great programmer hand-writing code will still outperform any mediocre programmer once the gleam wears off of their respective works and the bugs and problems start showing up. The project has 99.9% coverage on a thousand beautiful green tests, and, inside, the foundations are still rotten.

God, though, I understand why so many people are chasing that dragon, even though it’s going to ruin their careers, and maybe even their lives. I get why people fall for this, in spite of the externalities that they must know of by now. In spite of the colossal waste, the loss of fresh water resources, the fact that AI datacenters are the fastest growing source of carbon emissions, the people suffering sky-rocketing power bill and rolling outages near these new datacenters, the reams and reams of fascist propaganda these machines are producing to tear our society apart, the corruption, the market manipulation, the plain and simple fact that the ultimate purpose of these tools is to put their users out of a job entirely… well, once you finally get a taste of what it feels like to be great… I suppose all of those problems seem so far away.

I have been developing a theory that there might be something about working with a laptop in a cafe that tends to specifically attract people who suck ass. I don't meant that everyone who works with a laptop in a coffee shop is an asshole, but that assholes in Los Angeles might be living the kinds of lives which cause them to cluster there. We have to work in cafes more frequently now because we are spending so much time driving across the city to deal with construction at our house. Maybe this has turned us into pieces of shit, too, but I think we have stiff competition.

In the last few weeks, I've sat next to a whole range of idiots and losers who insist on holding meetings where they utter loathsome shit I never want to hear again in my life. I sat next to a guy who was designing a chatbot for a web storefront. Nobody was engaging with the chatbot, so he spent half an hour in a meeting proposing, over and over again, that they "make engaging with the chatbot seem mandatory" in order to juice the participation numbers. He had to explain this to the call over and over again; I am imagining that everyone else on his team was confused, cautiously asking him why they'd want to lie to their customers about the purchase experience.

I also once sat next to two women in their 20s who were trying to become Substack stars. They spent about two hours discussing television, which seemed to be their industry - unfortunately their opinions were pretty preposterous, and I was forced to listen to them discuss the "rules" around how a character should be killed in a TV show. Their takeaway was basically that all character deaths should be handled like Game of Thrones, which did it the best. They also discussed juicing Substack engagement, which was worrying for me to hear because of the whole Nazi thing. One of them also mentioned in a quick aside that she disapproved!! of Bad Bunny's completely anodyne and sensible pre-Super Bowl statements about the Trump administration's racism. So I think I found the next generation of Nazi-sympathizing TV writers?

All anecdotal evidence, of course, for my theory of cafe shitheads. But it's possible actually that I'd hate a huge percentage of people in this city if I met them through the lens of their work. Maybe the chatbot guy is kind and pleasant to his peers and loved ones, and also simply completely willing to debase himself for a paycheck. Who knows. I've sat next to too many LLM marketing guys to count, which makes me wonder what percent of all the marketing people I've ever known have now been pressed into the service of chatbot companies. In nearly any cafe in Los Angeles I can count on finding at least one guy in his 20s sweating and fretting over the need to extract business value from a large language model. In Westwood I once sat next to a guy who was trying to incompetently and incorrectly explain LLMs to a client, growing increasingly despairing and agitated throughout the conversation. He looked like he hated his work just as much as I hated his work.

I've never felt more depressed about work itself than I have in the last year. I have friends in games and tech who've been joking that they have to, like, retvrn to the soil and do non-digital work to escape the coming rot. But I've heard enough bad stories about workers in physical industries, too, having to interact with systems of control powered by LLMs. Work seems to just be getting worse.

I'm not writing this because I'm despairing and I want you to share in my despair, though. I'm writing this as a sort of memorialization of the moment, because I am fairly confident that the things I'm seeing and hearing in Los Angeles these days are extremely temporal.

This is the 2026 vibe, but things are changing very quickly. Family members are emailing me about their plans to survive the obvious coming financial crash. Videogame hiring has stopped, but nothing viable has yet appeared to fill the void for this industry, and every publisher's 2027 slate is probably looking pretty thin. My friends are all scrambling to stay employed, but they know it's all going to resolve, one way or another, before the end of the year. The people in these cafes are trying desperately to extract value from a dying fad. Everything in politics, too, has the feel of Wiley E. Coyote's feet windmilling before they begin to fall precipitously downward. I am very, very confident that I won't feel exactly this way next year. Whatever I'll be feeling will be very, very different.