The metaphor
I've never done the drive or walk up Mt. Washington, but I've been seeing the bumper stickers all my life:
It's interesting to think of how different a relationship to the natural world the people who built that road must have had.
I don't think we should build any more roads up any of the other White Mountains of NH, but...the road that exists is a visceral reminder of how different the past must have been.
And thinking about our friend Mcluhan's framing that media extends our senses and capabilities, a road up a previously unnavigable mountain is an interesting metaphor for LLM coding.
An example: Open Source in 2026 seen thru this metaphor
Open Source contributing is like climbing a mountain. Practically anyone can do it, very few actually do.
Because of the hazards (broken code, broken limbs...), cultural etiquette builds up. The community is very open to outsiders! But because of the investment it takes to join it stays pretty niche.
Then somebody paves a road to the top of the mountain. People who always wanted to get around to climbing a mountain but never bought crampons show up, en mass!
And at the top of the mountain? Drama ensues!
(only semi-related but writing this reminded me of this gem:
)
What is to be done, given all this?
You can still walk up Mt. Washington, of course. But it may feel a little silly when you know you could drive.
You can drive up Mt. Washington at about 2x your walking speed. This gives you a speed increase, but still keeps the experience as similar to the original walking experience as possible(I think this is what most people are doing with LLMs today).
For the metaphor to really work, there'd be brand new roads up every mountain so if you wanted you could start driving up all the mountains, every weekend (this is me). Of course, this is also also pretty ridiculous, and ignores the reality that part of what makes a mountain worth climbing is the journey up.
Maybe a middle ground, though, could be still driving up the mountain, but then get out of the car (metaphorically) to walk around a bit on the summit.
Example: Ba-pa widget
Reading Mcluhan, I trying to get my head around his points on the phonetic alphabet so I had the my LLM system generate an html quiz (inspired by Andy Matuschak and Geoffrey Litt's recent talk).
That led to a chat session with the results of my quiz in the context, which led to the LLM mentioning Ba-Pa as an example of how our perceptions put arbitrary boundaries over spectrums.
That was very interesting. I'm thinking a lot recently about where, in a continuous process, our perceptions shift. It's come up recently with chess, trying to build a chess engine that is just at the boundary of my own understanding of how the engine works, but also can beat me. It's also come up thinking about LLM progress, how despite the ground truth of just slow and steady incremental progress my perception is of a few discrete "jumps" in capability (sonnet 3.5, MCP, last November, Fable...).
Anyways, all this is to say I had a widget made to really dig in to the Ba-Pa business. It's ridiculously overbuilt! There's even a quiz, and you can share you results to bluesky.
My ba/pa boundary lands at 17.5 ms of voice-onset time — a smooth knob, and my ear hears two words. https://streetlight.jakesimonds.com/slog/ba-pa-continuum/
And of course the mountain metaphor has already broken down a bit. My widget is maybe more like, drive up to Mt. Washington, then have the corp of engineers build an observation tower in the exact spot so I can really get a good look at the landmark I'm interested in.
Still, though. I've been making "pa" and "ba" sounds for over 30 years. Not to pat myself on the back but ... I've kinda been nailing it this entire time.
And yet. Did I ever in all those years really think about the difference between "pa" and "ba"? How it's actually a spectrum that my mind slices into two discrete sound categories? Never even crossed my mind.
Is this useful knowledge? Will this sort of LLM shenanigans produce the economic value or human enrichment to make all the bad parts of LLMs "worth it" in the long run? I have no idea.
Put your hand right in front of your mouth, uncomfortably close.
(thank you for reading this entire blog post, by the way)
Make a ba sound. Now a pa sound.
Did you feel it?