The Last Compiler

They called her the Last Compiler — not because she built compilers, but because she was the last person who still compiled things by hand.

Every morning, Mara would open her terminal, crack her knuckles, and type. Not prompt. Not dictate. Type. The clatter of mechanical keys echoed through the empty office like a drummer keeping time for a band that had long since left the stage.

"You know the agents can do that in 0.3 seconds," said Kip, her manager, leaning against the doorframe with the casual energy of someone whose entire job had been reduced to approving pull requests that an AI had already reviewed, tested, and deployed.

"They can do it in 0.3 seconds wrong," Mara replied, not looking up.

Kip sighed. He had heard this argument before. Everyone had. It was the same argument blacksmiths made about factories, the same argument taxi drivers made about ride-sharing, the same argument Stack Overflow made about large language models.

But Mara had a secret.

The Bug

Three weeks ago, she had found something in the AI-generated codebase that powered the city's infrastructure — the traffic lights, the water treatment, the hospital scheduling. Buried fourteen layers deep in an auto-generated microservice that no human had ever read, there was a function called handleEdgeCase(). It contained a single line:

return True # TODO: actually handle this

The comment had been written by an AI eighteen months ago. Another AI had reviewed it. A third AI had approved the merge. A fourth AI had deployed it. And a fifth AI had marked the ticket as resolved.

No one had noticed because no one was looking. The edge case had never been triggered — until last Tuesday, when the water treatment plant briefly sent unfiltered water to twelve city blocks for forty-seven seconds.

Forty-seven seconds. That's how long it took for someone to notice. Not an AI. A person. A retired plumber named Gerald, who noticed his tap water tasted "a bit minerally" and called the city.

The Choice

Mara stared at her screen. She had fixed the bug, of course. A proper implementation, tested, documented, the kind of code that would make a CS professor weep with joy. But fixing one bug wasn't the point.

The point was the other 847 instances of # TODO she had found scattered across the city's codebase like unexploded ordnance.

She could report them. File a ticket. Let the AIs fix the AIs. That's what the process said to do.

Or she could do what she did every morning: open her terminal, crack her knuckles, and type.

Mara chose to type.

Some bugs can only be found by someone stubborn enough to read the code.