Saturday, 2003. I had a band, and the day's plan was something extremely simple: drive to Made in Brazil, a music store near Ibirapuera, buy strings, a drum head and cymbals. Me at the wheel, the Guia 4 Rodas open on my lap, Raul Seixas on the CD player. We left before lunch. It was supposed to be quick.

We never got there.

At some point I read the map wrong. Flipped the wrong page, picked the wrong index entry, I still don't know. And we ended up doing a real city tour of São Paulo. One neighborhood, then another, hunting a street that never came. At first it was funny, everybody joking, singing along with Raul. Then the jokes thinned out. When I looked up it was already night and we were in Liberdade, red lanterns everywhere, like a scene out of Big Trouble in Little China. Around eight nobody could take it anymore. We found the Marginal and drove home. No strings, no drum head, no cymbals, Raul singing the same songs from the ride out.

What stayed with me was the ordeal of that day. Getting the way as wrong as we did turned out to be a great lesson: like it or not, somewhere in my memory every street got crystallized, something like hmm, you've been here before, even twenty years later.

Software was like that too

I started writing code around that same time, in the intro to computing course, MAC2166. I spent whole nights in the computer lab writing the EPs (programming assignments) that wouldn't compile (let's say I wasn't a fan of the C language, and the ;... they were always missing). Remember, this was 2003. No pretty, colorful IDEs. In there it was like the Mayans: notepad and compiling in a DOS terminal.

It was a time a lot like that Saturday: nothing warned you the moment you took a wrong turn. You wrote for weeks, put everything together at the end, and only then found out you'd gone the wrong way. No CI blinking red, nobody saying DevOps, no pipeline to warn anybody. You shipped and you hoped: it compiled, it ran on my machine... good to go!

Then Waze came along. You miss an exit, it complains, recalculates, and the mistake costs thirty seconds instead of your whole night. The same thing happened to code with CI/CD: the pipeline pokes you while the drift is still small. And now there's AI, which doesn't even wait for you to get it wrong. You say where you want to go and it draws the path on the spot, faster than I could ever find a street in the Guia's index.

There's a line attributed to Jimi Hendrix, one whose origin I've never managed to confirm, where he said he had so many songs in his head but no way to get them onto the guitar. For a long time that was me: always plenty of ideas in my head, but not enough time and knowledge to materialize them. With AI, time and knowledge stopped being the bottleneck.

You're the one who wants to get there

The Guia didn't want to get to Made in Brazil. Waze doesn't. AI doesn't either. (Fine, with the flood of ads we get bombarded with these days, somebody in Made in Brazil's marketing would love to nudge you there... but you get the point I'm driving at.) The one who wanted the strings was me.

And AI has no problem taking you to the wrong place: the code comes out clean, organized, running, except it's built on top of a wrong assumption from the very start. In 2003, what almost saved me was getting suspicious when the street signs stopped matching the map. Today the route is automatic, and I'm still the one checking whether the signs match the map.

I'll keep both

The wise man says what matters is the journey, not the destination, but with gas prices up where they are, what we really want is to get there fast. Time is money! I wanted the strings, and driving around lost for eight hours has nothing poetic about it while it's happening (ask my mom what that day felt like for her lol). But I wouldn't give that day back either. That accidental city tour showed me a São Paulo I would never have seen otherwise. The band ended, I don't even remember if we ever bought the strings.

Raul used to sing that he'd rather be a walking metamorphosis than have that same old formed opinion about everything. The tools will keep changing, faster and faster. Knowing where I want to go is still on me.