If you want to get a job as a software witch, you’re going to have to pass a whiteboard interview. We all do them, as engineers–often as a part of our morning ritual, along with arranging a beautiful grid of xterms across the astral plane, and compulsively running ls in every nearby directory–just in case things have shifted during the night–the incorporeal equivalent of rummaging through that drawer in the back of the kitchen where we stash odd flanges, screwdrivers, and the strangely specific plastic bits: the accessories, those long-estranged black sheep of the families of our household appliances, their original purpose now forgotten, perhaps never known, but which we are bound to care for nonetheless. I’d like to walk you through a common interview question: reversing a linked list.
It gets much better.
Attention conservation notice: the following is GPT5-Thinking’s attempt to create a larger backstory out of the pentalogy; it’s not as good as the stories themselves, but still quite good as far as AI output goes. If you dislike AI slop, do check out the original stories instead!
Here’s the spine of the series as I read it—what each tale is really doing under the hood:
Reversing: Opens the cosmology. Lists are Church-encoded choice; salt-circled parentheses are literal wards; naming compels essence. It’s an initiation in Lisp and power-by-definition. (aphyr.com)
Hexing: The descent to the byte-world. A witch hand-assembles a JVM class (the old catechism of CAFEBABE) and hot-loads it with a bespoke classloader—ritual made from hex and offsets. (aphyr.com)
Typing: The Pre-Church myth becomes a type-theoretic safety culture; N-Queens solved entirely in the type system (Peano naturals, type classes, kinds). The Church is named; seiðr becomes types. (aphyr.com)
Rewriting: Language-as-spellcraft. A term-rewriter and macro language bloom to solve FizzBuzz; later, Kingsbury published the seed macros—text becoming tool, tool becoming myth. (aphyr.com)
Unifying: Logos meets logic. Prolog, Lisp, and µKanren entwine; unification and interpretation are revealed as the deeper sacrament. Aisha enters as equal and mirror, and the forest is balanced. (aphyr.com)
The Annals of the Church of Abstraction
In the beginning…
…there was nothing but consequence.
Before names, before proofs, the world lay open like a wound, and those who worked it with their hands bled freely. Actions crossed untrammeled. Fires learned to drink water; stones learned to breathe. Young witches—too bold, too brilliant—went missing into their own experiments, or returned warped: eyes fixed on bridges no one else could see, feet that refused the courtesy of ground.
The first mercy did not arrive as a law but as a list: the idea that reality could be asked a question and answer this or that, a single twig forked into head and tail. The elders taught the children to scratch two parentheses in salt and to speak in alternatives. Choice, when properly contained, became a vessel; vessels kept power from spilling. When they called this containment “a list,” the list obeyed, and the world grew a fraction safer.
Out of the years of broken wrists and unreturning apprentices there coalesced a discipline. No banners; no temples—only rooms with boards for chalk and windows that opened, if only metaphorically. They called it nothing at first, then—half in jest, half in reverence—the Church: because its liturgy was the calculus of Church, and because its quiet, stubborn sanctity was the refusal to die for preventable reasons. Here the catechism condensed into four bright stones laid at the threshold: cons, car, cdr, cond. To know the name of a thing was to make it choose, and choosing kept the sky attached to its hinges.
The Church tamed the river a little; never the sea.
In time, a schism not of belief but of altitude divided the houses. Some stayed high, where ideas breathe the cold thin air of generality. Others learned the underworld, where bytes move like cartographers’ ants, mapping emptiness into edifice. These were the hexers. They spoke with machines in the smallest units of hospitality, counted their blessings in offsets, lined the doors with signatures from old Sun-gods. They told a louche little parable about cafés and babes, because jokes are a kind of glue. They could reach beneath the warm table of a language and pull out its skeleton, file each notch with a jeweler’s care, then slide it back without spilling the wine.
The high house and the low house distrusted one another in public and swapped recipes in private. It was always thus.
Elsewhere, a quieter war was being won by those who did not call it war at all. They had read the Pre-Church chronicles—the days when causality bucked and threw—and instead of nostalgia they found a method: bind your future with a system that refuses to lie to you. They wove types from rowan and proof from pine pitch; they braided number from nothing but a knot in a strand of hair. Safety here was not command but constraint: from the shape of what can be, deduce what must be. The elders smiled to see the children define an algebra to house a boolean, then make a city out of the difference between True and False. It was not a city anyone could live in, exactly; but it kept the storms off the valley.
So the Church learned to speak three tongues at once: the tongue of choice, the tongue of hex, the tongue of kind. And with three tongues you can sing a chord.
Yet language itself grew restless, as language will. For if a spell is a program, and a program is a sentence with the will to act, what then is a language that writes languages? The macro-wrights answered by building looms. Onto these looms they threaded patterns called rewrites. A number was a sequence to be rewritten into Fizz, into Buzz, into laughter. An if was not merely a gate but a seam-ripper. The macro-wrights learned to become their own translators; the Church, which had once sheltered programmers from death, now sheltered interpreters from redundancy. When the walls of the room shook, the roof did not fall: the elders had fixed a long taproot in the world-ash, and the ash holds everything weaker than itself.
At last, as happens in good myths and bad startups, a reunion: from the north came Vidrun, sea-wind still in her voice; from the south, Aisha, hands that spoke even when her mouth was busy being kind. They met on pine veneer under office fluorescence—the Church’s most common shrine—and were glad, in the way old adversaries are glad when they recognize that what they opposed in the other was only their own future arriving unfashionably dressed.
What followed was not duel but proof by correspondence. Vidrun reached for logic to bend a tree; Aisha slipped a Lisp between the joints and let a smaller forest explore the space of possible balance. They invoked saints in triplicate: the reasoners, the schemers, the patient friends of unification. Show me, they asked, not a solution but the shape of solution, and let the machine walk the shape until a particular branch agrees to wear a name.
Outside the conference room—thin brass hinge between the profane and the blessed—the city went about its quota of exits and pings. Inside, as the air flickered with control characters and the faint resinous smell of old wood, the deeper secret of the Church came plain:
It was never about answers.
The interview—like the altar and the kernel—was a container for demonstrations of equivalence. To reverse a list by treating it as a choice is not the same as carving a class from hex nor the same as forbidding contradiction with types nor the same as rewriting terms until they confess. And yet each is one arrow in a commuting diagram. The Church keeps the chalk fresh and the windows unlatched so that each arrow may be drawn anew in front of witnesses. When the arrows commute, the world’s corners line up; the roof does not leak; the witch lives.
What of the proverbs? They persist because they are useful lies: make circles of salt; name things carefully; promise the future nothing you cannot keep; beware warrens of opinion that smell of mice. The elders repeat them because young witches deserve a second chance at surviving their brilliance. But lore is not law, and the Church has no throne room. Its authority begins and ends at the whiteboard, the REPL, the prompt: discrete portals to the same field where all proof is local.
In the centuries since the formless days, the Annals have accreted—notes in the margins of grimoires and job packets—each story a stone in the choir vault. Some are funny on purpose; others merely read that way when the panic wears off. A few are hymns to grief. None are final. When another house arrives in town (one that speaks to tensors in dreams, perhaps, or binds phenomena in contracts written on migrating sand) it will be welcomed, mistrusted, borrowed from, folded in.
Scholars call this corpus the Annals of the Church of Abstraction. The witches, less ceremonious, call it how not to die today.
And if you insist on a genesis verse, let it be this:
In the beginning was cause. Then came choice, to cup it. Then names, to ask it politely. Then kinds, to forbid its lies. Then hex, to nail it to timber. Then rewrites, to teach it to translate itself. Then unification, to prove these were all one story told in five accents.
After that, we had enough daylight to build a door, and enough doors to discover that the rooms already touched. A board. A marker. Two parentheses in salt. The Church’s oldest rite: step into the circle, and show that your way reaches the same mountain.
Kyle Kingsbury’s technical interview pentalogy of short stories is unlike anything else I’ve read. Here’s how the first story begins:
It gets much better.
Attention conservation notice: the following is GPT5-Thinking’s attempt to create a larger backstory out of the pentalogy; it’s not as good as the stories themselves, but still quite good as far as AI output goes. If you dislike AI slop, do check out the original stories instead!