Just as I thought to write these lines, a one-line programming error has frozen many airlines, banks, hospitals, video-streaming services, point-of-sales terminals and websites. The CrowdStrike code expected 21 values in an array, but received 20. Only 8.5 million computers were affected on 19 July 2024, but they were cloud/data centre-based servers running the Microsoft platforms for enterprise-critical services. The event has been termed the largest IT fail ever. The Microsoft Corporation blames the CrowdStrike event on the European Union and its anti-monopoly regulations.

Much of this book was written with a large language model constantly nudging me to accept line completions (GitHub 2023). I redacted almost all content suggestions as uninteresting. For instance, it suggests right now, having observed what I wrote in the paragraph above, that ‘the Crowdstrike event was a “wake-up call” for the world. It wasn’t. It was a one-line programming error. It was a wake-up call for the people who wrote the code’. The model making this suggestion, however, was itself trained to more or less write code for people, so that wake-up call might be hard to respond to. Who or what is being called by whom or what is not clear.

When readers meet passages of code in the book, they should be awake to the writing of the code. I have often supplicated generative AI platforms to write code (e.g. write Python code to demonstrate the basic operation of an endpoint detection response system such as CrowdStrike. Please provide comments.). Their facility in writing it attests to the sometimes startling predictability of coding.