Breaking:
Artisinal developer aschews LLM assistance.
August 16, 2026 Eugene, OR -
For the 18th straight day local developer and patchouli enthusiast Sage Colvin has been protesting the local Cowork space to raise awareness for assembly language rights. “In these days of AI and LLMs generating all of this lazy-person code slop, we’re losing sight of the real base of everything we do.” Colvin told JFI in an exclusive interview over a standing meal of local, ethically harvesed beeswax wrapped in dandelion leaves and served with room temperature cat milk. “Look, in my 23 years on this earth I only know a few things to be true, Everyone should sleep on a bed of pine needles wrapped in reclaimed burlap, any manufactured structures are a crime against the earth, and any programming language that isn’t symbolic machine code is heretical and lazy. All these AIs do is generate python slop and I’m against every aspect of it. Why are we using these listless, torpid programming frameworks when we can write pure, machine code!?!?”.
Local workspace patrons are both confused and offput by the protest and the odor emanating from it. Workspace owners Robert and Dorothy Whitfield weren’t concerned with the one-man protest. “We really don’t get what he’s talking about”, Dorothy said. “I used to write COBOL before I retired”, Robert told JFI. “I am not sure that this kid actually knows how to write code at all. He’s only about 23 and last year he was running around telling everyone he was speaking for the Monarch butterflies. Really, I think he was doing something more positive back then. The paper mache wings he wore were quite good.”.
“He’s not really hurting anyone.” local workspace patron Jim Topper told JFI after a brief interaction with Mr. Colvin. “He did throw some of what I can only speculate were wadded up punch card paper at me, though, yelling something about ‘punch card rights’. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that punch card programming was generally Fortran or PASCAL due to the 80 character limits that those languages strictly enforced. I’m actually a bit curious as to where he’d even find punch card paper today, his resourcefulness could be better spent on other things.”
Local University of Oregon programmer Janus Rickson was less accommodating, however. “This guy is a total poser. He needs to go back to Fortranistan or wherever he thinks he is protesting for. I was writing Perl before that kid was born. Look, I get it. AI generates a lot of stupid code, but I think this dork is just uninformed.”
JFI was unable to obtain a follow-up quite from Mr. Colvin, he was last seen marching and chanting “Avengers Assembler” toward a local vegan dog treat store.