2026-07-02 · Architecture
The straw airplane
After the war, some Pacific islanders kept the runways going. Bamboo control towers, headsets carved from wood, a man on the strip waving two sticks the way the signalman used to. Planes had brought cargo once, so they rebuilt the airport and waited. The form was flawless. Nothing landed.
Copying irrelevant steps has been observed experimentally. In The hidden structure of overimitation, children copied actions that were unnecessary for the demonstrated task. That does not establish that all children copy the same way, that autistic children universally skip those actions, or why any individual chooses to imitate. The software analogy below is mine.
Copied software waits like the islanders. You take a product that works, and because you can't see which parts do the work, you copy all of it — the load-bearing logic and the decoration, the real check and the magic number someone froze three years ago and forgot. The clone has every feature. It just doesn't fly, because nobody asked what the runway was for.
That's garbage in, garbage out in a suit — not bad data, bad understanding copied at full fidelity. The farmer plants what grew last year, where it grew, and it works right up until the season turns and the field dies for reasons he never learned. The forager asks what the plant needs — the same way the child skips the tap on the lid. Same seed, opposite relationship to it.
So we keep deleting the decoration. The fixed 150 tokens. The rigid schema. The setting nobody remembers choosing. Every constant we pull out is one more piece of someone else's cargo cult we refused to haul along.
The experiment does not show that copying is inevitable. For a software team, the practical choice is what to make visible for others to copy. You can only choose what's visible to copy. Show that a thing works, and people clone the shell, decoration and all. Show how it works, and the same reflex builds something that flies. The copy instinct isn't the disease. Copying the form instead of the function is.
That's why we publish the runway labelled — so the part worth copying is the part that actually flies. The core is open. Read how it works, not just that it works. MIT, right here.
godcrm.ai/git/holetron-lab/godcrm
Correction · 29 September 2026: Removed universal claims about autistic children and inferred motives; limited the overimitation finding to the experiment.