I read a lot of papers. Lately I catch myself doing something I never used to do. Before I trust a result, I check whether the paper is real: is the journal a real journal, are the authors real people, does the data look like data or like something a machine dreamed up on request. That check used to feel paranoid. Now it feels like basic hygiene, and I don’t like that it does.

That unease has a name and a number now. In November 2025, Bernhard Sabel and Dan Larhammar published a Perspective in Royal Society Open Science called “Reformation of science publishing: the Stockholm Declaration”. Larhammar is a past president of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, so this is not a blog rant, it is a formal shot across the bow. Their message, stated flatly: fake and low-quality science is now being produced at industrial scale, and they call it “arguably the largest science crisis of all time, threatening to erode people’s trust in research.”

What the paper claims, in plain numbers

The authors name three threats to the literature. First, for-profit publishers, who charge steep fees for open access and take, by the authors’ own figure, between 25% and 35% profit from academia. Second, predatory journals, which publish a flood of low-quality papers with no real peer review. Third, and newest, paper mills.

The headline number is the number of fake papers: “hundreds of thousands per year,” which the paper attributes to two earlier studies. If that estimate is anywhere near right, the counterfeit is no longer a rounding error in the scientific record. It is a meaningful fraction of it.

What a paper mill actually is

A paper mill is a business. It manufactures articles with fabricated data, increasingly using AI-generated text, tables, and images, and then, in the paper’s own words, it “sells authorships to scientists under pressure to publish and bribes editors to publish these papers.”

The buyer is not a cartoon villain. It is usually a researcher who needs one more line on a CV to keep a job, land a grant, or finish a degree, working inside a “publish or perish” culture that counts papers instead of reading them. The paper’s point: the incentive comes first, the fraud follows. The metrics we chose, publication count, impact factor, h-index, get gamed, because any scoreboard eventually does.

What the Stockholm Declaration wants

The declaration was drafted at a conference at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on 9-10 June 2025, and signed by more than two dozen researchers, including the image-integrity sleuth Elisabeth Bik and a board member of PubPeer. It asks for four things:

• Academia takes publishing back. Move to non-profit models (diamond open access, authors keep copyright) instead of paying for-profit publishers.
• Reward quality, not quantity. Stop scoring people by how many papers they produce, in hiring, tenure, and funding.
• Independent fraud detection. Detection run by “researcher-controlled” bodies that are not funded by publishers, able to “fraud tag” fake articles and the journals that print them.
• Legislation. Legal definitions and penalties for industry-scale fraud, so that paying a paper mill carries an actual cost.

My take: the diagnosis is sharper than the cure

I believe the diagnosis. The cure I’m less sure about.

The scary number does a lot of work, and it arrives as an estimate carried across a citation, not something I can audit from the page. I would have liked a table. The four recommendations, meanwhile, are the ones the reform movement has been making for years. The paper knows this: it prints its own table of predecessors, Leiden 2015, DORA 2012, Plan S 2018, and more. Good ideas usually don’t fail for lack of being restated one more time. There is even a reply already in the same journal, titled “Why the Stockholm Declaration will never work”, which argues the plan rests on assumptions that are too optimistic. Read it next to the declaration, not instead of it.

Two smaller notes, for honesty. The lead author founds and holds a stake in a science-integrity foundation, disclosed in the paper. That doesn’t make him wrong, it is context. And the paper carries a line I keep re-reading: “We have not used AI-assisted technologies in creating this article.” You have to declare that now. That’s the world we write in.

Why this is your problem, even if your work is clean

If you’re a researcher trying to be found and cited, and your work is honest, you might file this under someone else’s problem. It isn’t.

Fakes don’t only add noise, they tax trust, and the tax is flat. When a reader, a reviewer, or an AI answer engine can’t cheaply tell your real result from a manufactured one, the cheap move is to discount all of it. Skepticism gets applied to the whole field, and the honest pay it right alongside the frauds. The entire reason to put real work where people can find it is that being found is supposed to mean being believed. Erode the trust base and visibility stops paying: you can be the most discoverable paper in your subfield and still lose, if the currency of the field turns out to be counterfeit.

So maybe the check I started doing, is this paper real, isn’t paranoia anymore. Maybe it is just what reading looks like now. I would rather it went back to being paranoid. Do you think it’ll?

You have seen the badge. Once or twice a year your LinkedIn feed fills with the same post: someone you know, usually a professor, announces they made the “World’s Top 2% Scientists” list. There is often a certificate. Sometimes a screenshot of a spreadsheet with one row highlighted in yellow. The comments say congratulations, and they mean it.

The list is real, and it is not junk. It comes from John Ioannidis and colleagues at Stanford, who built a set of science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators out of Elsevier’s Scopus. The logic is reasonable. Raw citation counts are unfair to compare across fields, so they normalize them, fold six measures (total citations, three author-position citation counts, the h-index, and a co-authorship-adjusted h-index) into one composite, and publish the top slice inside each field. That slice is what everyone now calls the top 2%. It comes in two flavors, a single-year snapshot and a career-long one.

Before you print the certificate: in at least one field, the list tracks a US postal code about as closely as it tracks merit.

What the paper actually checked

A 2025 paper in the Journal of Informetrics took the 2024 edition of the list, picked one field, and counted. Péter Sasvári and Gergely Ferenc Lendvai, both at Ludovika University of Public Service in Hungary, chose legal studies, partly because “Law” is one of the fastest-growing fields on the list: since the first edition it has grown 811% in the career-long ranking and 491% in the single-year one. They pulled every law scholar from both rankings, 766 people in all (393 in the single-year list, 373 in the career-long), then scraped roughly 50,000 of their publications from Scopus to see who was citing whom.

The United States is heavily overrepresented. In the career-long ranking, 213 of 373 legal scholars were based in the US, about 57%. In the single-year ranking it was just under half, around 46%. The same person tops both lists: Cass R. Sunstein, whom the authors call “leagues above his peers.” The best-ranked non-US scholar, David Weisburd, sits far behind. In the single-year data Sunstein’s rank is 242 and Weisburd’s is 4,787. Across the board the US median rank beats the non-US one (131,187 against 163,484 in the single-year set, where a lower number is better).

Where they publish is most of the story

The gap is not really about who writes better law. It is about where the writing lands. The top 10 journals for US scholars are, all ten of them, American law reviews, and not one is published by a “Big 5” commercial house (Elsevier, Sage, Wiley, Taylor and Francis, Springer). They are the in-house reviews of elite law schools: Harvard, Chicago, Yale, Stanford, Penn. The Harvard Law Review is the single most popular venue, and articles there pull a mean of about 101 citations each.

Non-US scholars publish somewhere else entirely. Their top journals are European and international ones, with far thinner citation means. Their most common venue by article count is actually Nature, but those articles average just 5.39 citations. Not a single Global South journal appears in any of the top-journal tables. And when Sasvári and Lendvai mapped the citation network, US scholars mostly cited other US scholars, a dense, inward-looking web. The authors’ description of the ideal candidate for the list in law is worth quoting in full: “one has to fit three criteria: publish frequently in Ivy League universities’ journals, cite U.S. scholars, and it definitely does not hurt to be American either.”

A ranking that measures the neighborhood

Put the pieces together and, in this field, the ranking is not really measuring the scientist. It is measuring the neighborhood the scientist publishes in. Citations pool where the papers already cluster, the composite standardizes that pool, and the ranking hands the trophy back to where it started. Call it the Matthew effect with a passport: citations accrue to those who already have them, and here “those” tend to carry a US affiliation. The authors describe an American “citation ecosystem that reinforces its central position,” frequently at the expense of Global South scholarship, which stays on the periphery of both the publishing and the citing.

What this is, and what it is not

I want to be careful, because it’s easy to over-read one paper. This is a single field, and law may be the strangest field you could pick for citation counting. A large share of US legal scholarship lives in student-edited law reviews that behave nothing like a physics or a medical journal, many of them without clean metadata for the databases to even read. Law is also split by legal system, common law against continental, so a scholar’s work is often local by nature. Sasvári and Lendvai point out that researchers working in Islamic, customary, or Jewish law are “visibly non-existent” on the list, and that Scopus itself under-indexes non-English work. None of this is claimed to generalize. I wouldn’t assume the same US share turns up in molecular biology or applied mathematics.

The authors are also not telling you to burn the list. Their words: “Completely disregarding ranking such as this one is, of course, not necessary.” What they are saying is narrower, and more useful. In legal studies the list carries a loud geographic accent, so it should not be read as the measure of who the best legal scholars are.

So what do you do with the badge?

Use it for less than the certificate invites. If you’re on it, enjoy it. It’s a fair sign your work gets read and cited, which isn’t nothing. If you’re ranking other people with it, for hiring, promotion, or a tenure file, remember that in at least one field it rewards a postal code about as much as a mind. “This person made the top 2%” honestly means “this person publishes in well-cited venues.” That is worth something. It is not the same sentence as “this person is among the best scientists alive,” even though the yellow highlight invites you to read it that way.

And if the world’s top 2% is this sensitive to where you happen to publish, what is it we’re actually ranking?

Eugene Garfield is the reason we count citations at all. He built the Science Citation Index, he gave us the impact factor, and in 1980 he wrote a short piece in Current Contents with a plain title: “Premature discovery or delayed recognition-why?” In it he named a thing every researcher half-suspects is real. Some papers sit almost uncited for years, then wake up and get cited a lot, long after most of the people who could have used them have moved on. Anthony van Raan later borrowed a nicer name for these papers from Perrault and the Brothers Grimm: sleeping beauties.

Here is the joke. Garfield’s own paper on delayed recognition was itself delayed-recognized.

That’s the finding of a 2025 preprint by Tariq Ahmad Mir and Marcel Ausloos, Forsaking your own (arXiv:2512.16943). It is a preprint, so treat it as a strong claim, not a settled one. But the claim is clean, and I’ve been chewing on it for a week.

The numbers

Garfield published the paper in 1980. By 2004 it had collected about 10 citations. That is 0.4 citations a year for a quarter century, from the single most cited name in the field that invented citation counting. For 23 of those years it never once cracked more than one citation in a year. The authors call it a deep sleep of 28 years.

Then it woke. Counting up to 15 September 2025, they find 45 citations in Scopus, 93 in Web of Science, and 205 in Google Scholar, which they reconcile to 214 unique citing papers (234 if you count Garfield citing himself). A paper that averaged one citation every two and a half years for decades is now a normal, respectably cited paper. On the beauty coefficient, a standard sleeping-beauty score, it lands at 159.55 and 144.62 across two citation peaks, in 2018 and 2023. Whatever threshold you pick, it qualifies.

Someone has to be the prince

What woke it up? Van Raan’s 2004 paper, the one that rechristened these papers “sleeping beauties.” After 2004 Garfield’s paper gets cited far more, and Mir and Ausloos note that in 141 of the 187 citations it collected after van Raan, roughly three quarters, it is co-cited with van Raan. The old paper rode in on the coattails of the new one.

There is an uncomfortable lesson here, and it is not about Garfield. Van Raan does not even cite Garfield’s 1980 paper. The revival happened anyway, because a well-placed, well-cited paper made the topic legible again and people went looking for the roots. Garfield’s paper needed a prince. It got one by luck, not because the work finally spoke for itself.

That’s the part I keep turning over. We tell ourselves that good work eventually gets found on merit. This is a case study in the opposite. The idea was correct. The author was famous. The paper still sat there for 28 years, and what saved it was somebody else’s visibility, not its own quality.

Where the story gets shakier

I run a company whose whole premise is that good research gets ignored and that being right isn’t enough. So I’m the last person you should trust to be skeptical here, and I want to be anyway.

“Delayed recognition” is not a fact of nature. It is a definition, and the definitions are somewhat arbitrary. Garfield’s own rule of thumb was 10 or fewer citations at age 10 and a tenfold jump by age 20. Van Raan added his own thresholds for the depth and length of the sleep. The beauty coefficient is yet another formula. Move the cutoffs and some sleeping beauties stop being beauties.

The authors are honest about a messier problem too. Garfield published in Current Contents, which was not peer reviewed, so Web of Science and Scopus record its metadata badly. Web of Science at one point piled the citations of 52 different articles from one 1980 issue onto a single paper. Every count above came from manual cleanup across three databases. And, again, it is a preprint. None of that kills the story. It just means the exact numbers matter less than the shape, and the shape is not in doubt.

If your work is being ignored right now

Read this as comfort or as a warning. I mean both.

The comfort: silence is not a verdict. Garfield’s paper was not wrong for 28 years and then suddenly right. It was the same paper the whole time. If your work is being ignored, that’s information about attention, not about quality.

The warning: attention does not show up on its own, and it did not show up for Garfield either. His paper waited a quarter century for an accident. Most papers never get a famous prince to co-cite them into daylight, and most of us don’t have Garfield’s name on the byline. If nobody knows the work exists, its merit never gets a turn.

So the question the paper leaves me with isn’t whether your good work will be recognized. It’s who, exactly, you’re counting on to be your prince, and whether it’s wise to wait for one to wander by.

There is a flattering idea floating around science-of-science, and it goes like this: your best work doesn’t dribble out evenly across a career. It arrives in a burst. A few golden years when almost everything you touch lands, and around them, before and after, the ordinary stuff.

That burst has a name. Liu et al. called it a “hot streak” in 2018: a bounded stretch in a creative career during which a person produces their highest-impact work. The unsettling part of their result was that the streak seems to strike at a random time. You cannot schedule it. You get one, if you get one at all. I find this idea seductive, and I distrust things I find seductive, so a new paper caught my attention.

What the study found

Hongkan Chen, Lutz Bornmann, and Yi Bu asked a narrow, testable question. Not “when does your best work happen,” but “when your best work happens, is it also your boldest?” (Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 2025) Their answer, from the careers of 21,271 economists: yes. “Disruptiveness of scientific publications is higher during researchers’ hot streaks than in their other periods of careers.” During the streak you’re not only cited more. You are also more likely to publish work that shoves the field in a new direction instead of reinforcing the old one.

What “disruptive” means here

That word needs a definition, because it is doing a lot of work. Some papers consolidate what we already know; later work leans on them and on their predecessors together. Other papers disrupt: later work cites the new paper and quietly stops citing what came before, as if the new paper made the old scaffolding unnecessary. The disruption index puts a number on that difference. A high score means your paper eclipsed its own references. The claim here is that hot-streak papers score higher on it.

Two findings I did not expect

First, the boldness is random too. Just as hot streaks land at unpredictable times, so does disruptive work: “we also observe the randomness rule for the occurrence of disruptive work.” You do not graduate into disruptiveness at a fixed career age.

Second, and this is the one I keep chewing on: “researchers’ most disruptive years are oftentimes earlier than their most highly cited years.” Your boldest paper and your most-cited paper are usually not the same paper, and the bold one tends to come first. The recognition lags the risk, sometimes by years.

What I don’t believe yet

I like this paper, and I don’t fully believe it yet.

It is economists. 21,271 of them is a large sample, but it is one field with its own citation culture. I wouldn’t bet the pattern transfers unchanged to molecular biology or to poetry.

The disruption index is contested. People argue about what it actually measures and how much it wobbles with database coverage and reference counts. Read “more disruptive” as “scored higher on one specific metric,” not as a verdict handed down by nature.

It is a correlation. Hot streaks and disruption travel together in this data. The paper doesn’t, and can’t, tell you that being disruptive triggers the streak, or that the streak makes you disruptive, or that some third thing drives both.

And one lever in the paper is not random at all: volume. “A higher publication volume of researchers increases the likelihood of entering hot streaks and producing disruptive publications.” Publish more, and you raise your odds of both. That is the least glamorous sentence in the paper and possibly the most useful.

Why care, if you are watching your own trajectory

If you’re staring at your own CV and wondering whether your good years are behind you or still ahead, this paper offers a small, cold comfort. The good years don’t seem to be something you earn on a schedule and then lose. They arrive when they arrive. What you can do is keep the tap open, because output feeds the odds. And if you’re sitting on a paper that feels riskier than your usual, the timing result hints that you might be earlier in a streak than the citation counts will admit for another few years.

The authors put the practical conclusion plainly, aimed at funders as much as scientists: “both scientists and funding agencies can assume the randomness of phases with important papers in scientific careers. But when these phases occur, impactful and disruptive papers can be expected.”

I’m glad they stopped there and didn’t try to sell me a recipe for manufacturing a hot streak. Because here’s what still nags at me. If the streak is random, and the disruption is random, and the two merely happen to move together, then the comforting story might collapse into something much plainer: sometimes a scientist has a good run, and during a good run good things cluster. Is that a law of creative careers, or is it just what any run of luck looks like from the inside? I’m not sure the data can tell those two apart. Are you?

You’ve heard the line even if you never opened the paper. Small teams disrupt, large teams develop. It comes from Wu, Wang and Evans in Nature in 2019, and since then it has been quoted in grant panels and on conference stages every time someone argues that science has grown too big to be brave. Small and scrappy breaks new ground. Big and well funded refines it.

A new preprint says the size part was mostly standing in for something else. Bili Zheng and Jianhua Hou, in “Synergy, not size”, argue that what drives disruptive work is not how many people sign a paper but how the collaboration is wired. It went up on arXiv in September 2025 and has not been peer reviewed, so read it as a strong claim, not a settled result.

What Zheng and Hou actually did

They looked at more than 14 million papers across 19 disciplines from 1960 to 2020. Instead of counting heads, they built what they call a synergy factor, a way to score the cost and benefit of adding people to a team. Then they ran a mediation analysis, which is a formal way of asking a simple question: when team composition predicts disruption, is size doing the work, or is something that size is merely correlated with doing the work? Their answer is that synergy, not team size alone, accounts for 75 percent of the link between who is on the team and how disruptive the paper turns out to be.

The best team size is not one number

The result that stuck with me is that there’s no single best size. Physics peaks at medium sized teams. The humanities reach their highest synergy through individual scholarship, one author alone. So “small teams disrupt” really means that the right architecture depends on the field, and in some fields the right architecture is a single person.

Star authors help, but not the ones you would rank highest

Two more numbers. Papers that include an exceptional researcher show, by their measure, 561 percent higher disruption. And a twist that should make anyone who reads CVs squirm: high-citation authors were linked to less disruptive potential, while authors with a track record of breakthroughs were linked to more. Being cited a lot and doing something new are not the same signal. Zheng and Hou sort teams into four modes: elite-driven, baseline, heterogeneity-driven, and low-cost.

So was “small teams disrupt” wrong?

Not really. This is not a refutation. It is a rewrite of the caption. Size was never the cause. It was a visible proxy for how a team combines skills and viewpoints. Small teams disrupt more, on average, because small teams are often wired for synergy by default. Build a large team that keeps that wiring and, in principle, you keep the disruption. That is a more useful claim than “stay small,” because wiring is something you can actually decide.

What I would not bank on yet

Three caveats, in order of how much they bother me. First, it is a preprint. No peer review, no independent replication that I’ve seen, and a 561 percent effect is exactly the kind of number a reviewer tugs on to see what falls off. Second, it is observational. Fourteen million papers is a mountain of correlation and zero experiments. Nobody randomly assigned scientists to teams. Third, and this is the one I keep circling back to, “disruption” here is a citation-pattern score, not a verdict on importance. The disruption index asks whether later work cites you instead of the things you built on. That captures something real, it also misses plenty, and the index has its own critics. When the paper calls a team disruptive, it means a shape in the citation graph, not a Nobel.

If you are choosing who to work with

Here is why a working researcher should care. If you’re picking co-authors, the size heuristic is easy and mostly wrong. This preprint’s version is harder and more honest: ask what each person adds that the others cannot, and whether adding them raises synergy or just raises the author count. A collaborator with one real breakthrough behind them may matter more than three with fat citation totals. And if you work in a field where solo work still disrupts, the reflex to bolt on co-authors may be quietly costing you the exact thing you were trying to buy.

I would hold all of it loosely until it clears review. But it does reframe a line I keep hearing repeated as if it were settled physics. Maybe the question was never how many people are in the room. Maybe it was always what happens once they are.

You probably saw the headline in early 2023. “Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time,” a study in Nature announced, and the internet did what the internet does. Science is running out of ideas. The age of breakthroughs is behind us. We are all filing footnotes now. Behind the headline sat one number: the CD index, also called the “disruption index.” It scores every paper on a scale from -1 (fully consolidating, it builds on what came before) to +1 (fully disruptive, it makes earlier work obsolete). Michael Park, Erin Leahey and Russell Funk, PLF for short, found the score had been sliding downward across every major field for decades, and concluded that progress was slowing.

A new paper in Research Policy (Newig et al., 2026) says: not so fast. Jens Newig and thirteen co-authors reassess the whole framing, and their message is blunt. In the social sciences, a high disruption score usually does not mean a breakthrough. It measures something closer to noise: relabeled ideas, missing citations, subfields talking past each other. Progress there is cumulative anyway, so using disruptiveness to judge whether research matters, or to declare that science is stalling, is measuring the wrong thing. This is a conceptual paper, not a reanalysis. They ran no new data (the paper says so outright). What they did was take PLF apart argument by argument, drawing on the philosophy and sociology of science, and hand the field a set of testable hypotheses.

How does a paper score as “disruptive”?

The mechanism is simpler than it sounds, and that is the problem. The CD index looks at the papers that later cite yours, and asks whether they also cite the works you cited. If they keep citing your sources alongside you, you look consolidating. If they cite you and drop your references, you look disruptive, as though you rendered everything before you obsolete. Nothing in that arithmetic knows why the later citations skipped your references. Newig et al. list four kinds of papers that score as disruptive without disrupting anything:

• Pseudo-novelty. Old wine in new bottles: relabeling an existing idea with fresh terminology. Their own Scopus search turned up more than 4,900 papers with the phrase “fresh look” in the title, abstract or keywords, 27% of them in the social sciences and 21% in arts and humanities, even though those fields are only 8% and 4% of Scopus.
• Blockbuster and canonical papers. Citations that are ceremonial, name-dropping a famous work “to shine in their reflected glory” rather than depending on it.
• Citation gaps. Sloppy or strategic omission of prior work, which fakes the look of having displaced it.
• Purely cumulative papers. A meta-analysis or systematic review synthesizes a field so well that later authors cite only it and skip the originals. That is the textbook shape of cumulative science, and the CD index reads it as disruption.

Each type may hit only a subset of papers, but together, the authors argue, they add up to a meaningful share of artificially inflated scores.

Why the social sciences look the most disruptive

Here is the number that carries their case. In PLF’s own data, social science papers had the highest CD values of the four fields the entire time, falling from about 0.54 in 1945 to 0.04 in 2010, while life and physical sciences sat at the low end. Newig et al. read that ranking the opposite way to PLF. The social sciences do not look disruptive because they break more ground. They look disruptive because they are fragmented. Richard Whitley’s phrase for it is “fragmented adhocracy”: research that is “personal, idiosyncratic, and only weakly coordinated across research sites.” Watts (2017) puts it more bluntly, that in such fields “facts and theories pile up in an incoherent heap.” For a real Kuhnian disruption you first need a paradigm to disrupt. Where there is no shared consensus to overturn, what looks like disruption is what they call pseudo-disruption: an academic “turn,” a fashion, an outside influence, not a genuine break.

The trend was already shaky

And “disruption is declining” was contested before this paper landed. Independent reanalyses had pulled at it. Petersen and colleagues (2024) argue the decline is largely an artifact of citation inflation: reference lists have grown longer over the decades, which mechanically drags CD scores down. Others trace the patent version of the decline to the omission of older references in PLF’s own dataset. A separate line of critique (Leibel and Bornmann, 2024) notes that the index is sensitive to how many references a paper has and how well cited they are, and that social science papers, which cite books that citation databases like Web of Science do not index, get artificially inflated CD values because those book references are invisible to the machinery. So there were already technical reasons to doubt the trend.

What Newig et al. add sits one level up. Even computed perfectly, the index may not mean what evaluators want it to mean. A measure is only useful if it maps to the thing you care about. If the thing you care about is “did this work advance the field,” the CD index answers a different question and hands you a confident-looking number regardless. They push further than most of PLF’s critics: genuine, substantive disruption, the kind that truly renders earlier findings obsolete, may be rarer than the metric suggests, not more common.

Fragmentation, not disruption, is the real opposite of cumulation

They do not only poke holes. They offer a different map. Disruption and cumulation, they argue, are not two ends of one road. The real opposite of cumulation is fragmentation. So they draw two axes, disruptive-versus-consolidating and cumulative-versus-fragmented, and most good work lands in the cumulative-and-consolidating corner, which is just Kuhn’s “normal science”: replication, refinement, synthesis. A recent survey of 761 major breakthroughs (Krauss, 2024) found that virtually all of them developed cumulatively rather than by rupture, which fits the picture. Disruption earns its keep only when it does real work, mainly falsification: a failed replication that kills a wrong result, which feeds the cumulative pile rather than blowing it up. The classic case the authors borrow from PLF is Watson and Crick’s DNA model refuting Pauling’s triple helix. A new “turn” that merely changes the subject is not progress. It is, in their framing, fragmentation wearing novelty’s clothes.

Why this matters if a metric is scoring you

If you’re early or mid-career, this isn’t abstract. Disruption-style metrics are drifting into hiring talks, grant panels, and the dashboards that try to score a person. In a cumulative field, the paper that carefully extends three others is doing exactly what progress looks like, yet on a disruption index it scores low, while a disconnected, thinly-referenced outlier scores high. Optimize for the number and you would be nudged to cite less and to pretend your work sprang from nowhere. The authors say the quiet part directly: research policy and evaluators should not treat high disruptiveness as inherently valuable, or low disruptiveness as stagnation, and PLF’s declining-disruption conclusion “should be interpreted with care.” You do not have to win that argument in the room. You just have to be able to name it.

The limits are the authors’ own. They did not prove the four mechanisms dominate the data. They hypothesized them and invited the rest of us to test them empirically. Their case against PLF is an argument, a good one, not a verdict. And none of it proves science is fine, or that stagnation is a myth. Real slowdown might be happening. The narrower claim is that one popular number is a poor way to check, especially in the messy, unconsolidated fields where it happens to score highest. So before you let a disruption score speak for your work, or anyone’s, it’s worth asking the old question. Says who, and measuring what?

Samer is a Fatah member, a Palestinian political activist, and chairman of the Jerusalem Development Fund. The first time we recorded, in March 2025, his claim was that peace is more urgent for Palestinians than for Israelis. The second time, in November 2025, he said that what October 2023 exposed was not a lack of information but a lack of imagination. This time he came with something new: he is building a party.

His thesis is one sentence long. For sixty years Palestinians tried to pressure Israel, with violence on the ground and with diplomacy abroad, and it produced nothing. The only road to a Palestinian state runs through convincing Israelis, which means putting Israel’s security at the base of Palestinian national strategy. Not as a favor to us. As Palestinian self-interest.

I should say where I stand. I am the pessimist in this conversation. Near the end I told Samer that I am for the vision he describes but that I find it hard to see it happening, because nothing good has happened here for a long time, and because building trust is a matter of years. I do not know whether he is right. I do know that talking to him leaves me less bleak than I was before, which is not the same as being convinced.

The full conversation, in Hebrew, is on YouTube: https://youtu.be/XzPBGczt4vY. What follows is translated from the Hebrew and edited lightly for clarity.

Why go to Washington, ten thousand kilometers away, or to Paris, four thousand kilometers away, when we have the Israelis five kilometers away?

Twenty years without an election

Boris Gorelik: Before we get to your party, give us a picture of how Palestinian politics actually works. The legislative council, the geographic split between Gaza and the West Bank, and what people are voting on.

Samer Sinijlawi: The Palestinian political system is closer to the French one. There is a parliament, a government, and a president, so there are two elections. There is the presidential election, and there is the election for the legislative council, which has the right to form a government and run Palestinian affairs.

Our last presidential election was in 2005. Mahmoud Abbas was elected as Fatah’s candidate, after Yasser Arafat.

Boris: Who did he run against?

Samer: Against Mustafa Barghouti, an activist from the left, if I can call it left. Abbas won 60 percent of the vote, for a four-year term. And then he cancelled the elections and continued for twenty-one years.

In parallel, in 2006, we had the election for the legislative council, our parliament, which also forms our government. Hamas won there, about 60 percent of the seats, against 40 percent for Fatah. In 2007 came the coup in Gaza, when Hamas took the territory by force. From then on we had two rulers: Hamas ruling Gaza, and Abbas ruling the West Bank. And no elections.

In 2018 Abbas dissolved the legislative council and started to be the legislating body himself. Every Palestinian law since then has come through a presidential decree. The president decides which law is enacted, what is legislated and what is not. All the power in the hands of the president. That is the West Bank. In Gaza, Hamas ruled 100 percent.

Today, after all these years, after a lot of pressure from us and also pressure from international actors who wanted a change in Palestinian politics and in the Palestinian leadership, we finally have a date. It is thirty-one days after the election on the Israeli side.

Can Gaza vote? Can Jerusalem?

Boris: Would the elections take place in the West Bank and in Gaza at the same time? And what happens with the residents of East Jerusalem?

Samer: Simultaneously, yes, that is the plan. As for Jerusalem, under the Oslo accords Palestinians there are allowed to vote. Israel has to approve that we use the Israeli post offices, people vote there, and afterwards the boxes go by mail to the Palestinian Central Elections Committee. That is how it worked in 1996, in 2005, in 2006, in every election held in the Palestinian Authority. But the recent Israeli governments have not approved the participation of Palestinians inside Jerusalem.

There is a solution. The Central Elections Committee has electronic voting, and I think we should go in that direction.

Gaza is a different set of challenges. Gaza today is not the Gaza we knew. There is almost no Gaza. There are three large populations in three different places: in the middle of Gaza City, in the center around Deir al-Balah, and in the al-Mawasi area. So maybe the committee needs to set up three election hubs, each one tied to where a large population is. There is a technical solution for running this election.

Boris: And Hamas in Gaza would allow it?

Samer: I think yes. They allowed the municipal elections to take place in Gaza in the past. And you should know that Hamas wants out of governing Gaza. It does not interest them to keep being the government there.

Why? Because they did not only lose power, they also went bankrupt. They are not paying salaries to their civil servants. They owe something like a billion dollars in debts to local banks. They simply went bankrupt. They know they cannot run this event.

There is some negotiation going on now with the peace envoy and his representatives, and the American envoys. On one side Hamas says: we can hand over the entire government right now to the national committee for administering Gaza, and we are ready to hand over the police and the security apparatus of the government, everything we received from the Authority in 2007, including the weapons of the local police. And after that succeeds, let them start disarmament, we will give them the tools to do the work. On the other side, the Israelis and the Americans say no, disarmament first. And that is where everything gets stuck.

We are also stuck in Gaza because it is an election season on the Israeli side. I do not think the political echelon wants any progress in Gaza right now. Let us see after the elections.

“I do not believe the polls”

Boris: You say Palestinians are fed up with Hamas and with Abbas. But if I am not mistaken, the pollster Dr. Khalil Shikaki shows support for Hamas, and in the West Bank even more than in Gaza.

Samer: Listen, I also follow the polls on the Israeli side. If I look at Channel 14’s polls [Channel 14 is the strongly right-wing, pro-Netanyahu channel], that gives you one picture. If I look at Channel 11, or 12, or Haaretz [11 is the public broadcaster and 12 the main commercial channel, both roughly centrist; Haaretz is the strongly left-wing newspaper], it depends who runs the poll. I do not believe these polls. I say it is a black box. You have to go to real elections, and there we will find out who has what power on the Palestinian side, whether Palestinians want change now or whether Palestinians are stuck where they used to be. And especially now, with everything going on in Gaza, I do not think you can run a poll accurately.

But I know Palestinian society a little. I say “a little” because I want to be modest. There is the Fatah bloc, Abbas’s bloc. There are 60,000 Palestinians inside the Palestinian security apparatus. There are 250,000 people employed by the Authority. That gives a lot of influence. So Abbas will still have power, maybe 25 percent. And Hamas will stay 25 percent.

Boris: Would Hamas run as a party under its own name?

Samer: They will find a solution. They will do some rebranding, they will come in through lists that look independent, and everybody will know what it is. Understand that Hamas is a political movement that has a military wing, not the other way around. For them, not participating in national elections is suicide. There is no such thing. They have to be there. They will try to build coalitions with others. I do not know what their final list will look like, but I am almost certain they will run in this election.

So there is 45 or 50 percent that is the Abbas and Hamas bloc, and there is 50 percent, maybe more, maybe 60, of voters who want something new. And there are new centers of power now presenting themselves as players in the coming election. There is Mohammed Dahlan and his stream, who have organized as a party or a list, and I think they will be a significant force. There is the New Way, the party we are building. There may be others who put up lists.

Palestinians are fed up with Hamas and with Abbas. Fed up with the destruction Hamas brought down on them in Gaza, and fed up with the corruption Abbas brought down on them in the West Bank.

Boris: If I remember correctly, the commentators back in 2006 said the public was fed up with Fatah’s corruption, and that Hamas was elected not because the public is so religious but because it did not want the Authority’s crooks. If that is true, then the chance for a party like the one you are building is high, because Fatah has not become less corrupt, and certainly Hamas has not.

Samer: Correct, although the picture is different now. In 2006 the Palestinian public had Fatah’s failed product in front of it. They saw corruption and they saw no progress. Oslo said five years of an interim agreement and after that we go to a permanent status arrangement. From 1993 to 1998 there was no progress, and we arrived at the Second Intifada. So Fatah’s product was not very convincing.

There was disappointment, and Hamas was the alternative. They also used the fact that they were victims of both sides, of the Palestinian side and of the Israeli side that fought them very hard, and they took a place in the heart and the mind of the Palestinian public. And they were smart, they picked candidates who were connected to the public. Let us say everything was working in their direction. So they rose.

Now the Palestinian public knows where Hamas led us. Gaza was erased. I do not think there will be another vote for Hamas or for Abbas. But they still hold power in the street.

What Palestinians are actually looking for

Samer: Palestinians today, Boris, get up every morning knowing that today is worse than yesterday. If there is a political force that can carry them and give them not only a vision but a practical vision, a plan that tells them there is a way for life to get a little better every morning, that answer matters. Palestinians are looking for that answer. That is where our opportunity is.

I see that inside Gaza in particular there is a desire for change. From my own activity I see how many Gazans are watching and hoping that someone can bring a force that can put things in a better order.

I have to put the security of the Israeli side at the base of every Palestinian national strategy. Not as a favor to you. To serve the national interest of my own people.

Is there a partner?

Boris: In our first conversation, in March 2025, your claim was that peace is more urgent for Palestinians than for Israelis, precisely because their situation keeps getting worse. Let me stay on the realistic side. Not that we all suddenly sit down together and start arguing about whose hummus is better. Do you still see a situation in which Israelis and Palestinians elect governments that are capable of working with each other, that do not maintain the conflict but find a way for us to say, twenty-five years from now, that the conflict has ended?

Samer: Look, the partner problem has been a serious problem in recent years. Israelis really did look for partners and did not find them on the Palestinian side. And part of the Palestinian people also lost hope that we have a partner on the Israeli side.

Everyone who says there is no partner on the other side and there never will be a partner on the other side is wrong. There is no partner now. I think there will be a partner. I am optimistic. I see a change that is almost arriving on the Israeli side. I can already imagine the next Israeli cabinet. With that next Israeli cabinet I think yes, there is a partner, not only for Palestinians, there is a partner for the whole world, and that is something Israel badly needs.

Israel has disconnected, and not only on the Palestinian question. You are also moving far away from your serious friends around the world, including Europe, including the moderate Arab states. In the last three years I have not heard of an Israeli prime minister receiving an invitation to some capital in Europe, or some capital in the Middle East. Even now such meetings are refused, in the United States too. So there is an Israeli need, an internal one, and there is an international Israeli need, for Israel to produce a different political leadership that can repair all the damage in the international theater.

A change like that also gives us, as Palestinians, options. We can look at the Israeli side and say we have an opportunity now, there is someone to talk to. But if that change on the Israeli side is not matched by a parallel change on the Palestinian side, it stays an Israeli event. The moment there is change on the Palestinian side too, it starts being a regional event, an international event, and it starts to be interesting to everybody.

The New Way: criticize ourselves, not them

Samer: That is the new thing we are bringing into Palestinian politics now. The New Way. We say the way has to change.

We focus more on where we went wrong, not on where the other side went wrong. Look at this conflict. Both sides always want to give lectures to the other side. You are wrong about this, you need to do that. But there is never internal criticism. Here we concentrate on internal criticism. We do not want to discuss their mistakes. Let them find their own mistakes, and what they fix is their business. Here we look at the mistakes we made.

For sixty years we always tried to pressure Israel by using violence on the ground and by trying to recruit the whole diplomatic world against Israel. That strategy failed. We got nothing from it.

We believe the only way that can bring good outcomes for the Palestinian side is to try to convince the Israelis, not to pressure them. Why do we need to talk to the entire world about Israelis? To go to Washington, ten thousand kilometers away, or to Paris, four thousand kilometers away, when we have the Israelis five kilometers away? So why not talk to the Israelis. It is easier for us to convince the Israelis than to convince the whole world to pressure the Israelis.

“You are strong. Do not rely on anyone.”

Boris: Especially after 7 October, people tell me: fine, Samer says nice words, but all they want is to lull us to sleep. Maybe they are right, maybe not. But that is an experiment I do not want to run on my own life again.

Samer: You do not need to run it on your life. Do not rely on anyone, Boris. You are a strong country. And make no mistake, even after 7 October you have the strongest army in the Middle East. 7 October did not happen because the Israeli army is weak. It happened because there was no Israeli army on the Gaza border that morning.

You are strong. You do not need to rely on anyone. Take care of your own security yourselves. Do not rely on a partner on the Palestinian side and do not rely on a partner on the American side.

But that does not mean you come in this direction from a position of weakness. The opposite. You demonstrated the strength you managed to demonstrate in front of the whole world, and you come to this from a position of strength. And any strength that has no diplomatic option next to it is worth nothing. The military option can buy quiet. It cannot buy peace and strategic security forever.

Israel’s security will be created only through diplomatic effort. A regional order that brings in all the new players, including the Saudis. Israel starting to be part of the Middle East, connected to everyone. And a Palestinian government that believes the basis of any successful Palestinian national strategy is the security of the Israeli side.

I have to put the security of the Israeli side at the base of every Palestinian national strategy. Not as a favor to you. To serve myself, to serve the national interest of my own people.

“We are both looking at each other from the surface”

Samer: Right now the Israeli public perceives us very badly. Why? Because the two of us look at each other from the surface, and the picture on the surface is a black picture. It is not a pretty picture. We both did bad things to each other. There is no Mother Teresa here.

But if you start looking a little deeper, we are human beings and you are human beings. Even if we are perceived by you as if everything we want is to destroy the State of Israel and not to build a Palestinian state, that is not accurate. I know both peoples well, and I say these things inside Palestinian conversations too: Israel does not want to destroy us, it does not want to throw us into the sea. Do not listen to Smotrich, do not listen to the extremists, they do not represent the Israeli public. The Israeli public wants to live in peace, in quiet, in security. If they know that a Palestinian state will supply them with security, they are ready to leave the territories and allow it to happen.

But they are not there. We have to convince them that a regional order that brings a Palestinian state next to the State of Israel can supply Israel with security. And to get there, we have to change many things.

We are not important at all. You, the Jews, are important. We were lucky that we fell into a conflict with you.

Why Egypt was the easy case

Boris: How many years, in your estimate? Not counting miracle governments, but realistic ones that move the issue forward. How many years until this is not as bad as it is now?

Samer: Let us look at a piece of history. The October of the 1970s was maybe similar to what is happening today. You had thousands of Israelis killed in October 1973. There was strong hatred in the Israeli people toward the Egyptians, and from the Egyptians toward the Israelis, and nobody thought it was possible to make peace with Egypt. And suddenly the Egyptian leader took one step, went up to the Knesset podium, and in less than an hour it changed.

But I will tell you the biggest difference. Egypt and Israel are very far from each other. So the leaders, Begin and Sadat, could sign a beautiful agreement with Carter, and the armies could put away their weapons. Here we are really close to each other. I think that today an Israeli walking into Cairo, a Jewish Israeli walking into Cairo, is better off not saying that he is Israeli and Jewish.

Here we are much too close for that model to work. Say Mohammed Dahlan and the next prime minister of Israel get up and sign some agreement. There will be balloons, they will fly. I still do not think we would be able to live in peace.

Boris: So it is not only a matter of a signature. It is a matter of deep internal change.

Samer: If a Palestinian political force rises and gets support from the street, and says we start from the base, we change the Palestinian narrative.

Rewriting the Palestinian narrative

Samer: We recognize the historical connection, the historical right of the Jewish people in this land. That is a fact, and it is a fact that is in the Qur’an. Why do we run away from it? Why do we not recognize this right? They were here. They belong here. You, the Jews, were here, and you belong here.

But look at the facts from your side as well. You were never alone here. There were always others, and the others are us. So nobody keeps rolling this conflict under the headline of either us or them. Both of us together.

And after that recognition, that same political force says: zero violence. If we want to produce good outcomes for both of us, we have to talk to them and convince them, and we will not allow violence. And there will be support from the street strong enough that all Palestinians will believe we have to resist violence, not to let violence take the lead. And then we start talking, and we tell you: both of us belong here.

We had coexistence here for thousands of years. We got tangled up in the last hundred. Let us find the shared future together, two peoples next to each other, cooperating on everything.

“We are lucky that we fell into a conflict with you”

Samer: I always ask a question of my Palestinian friends, in all the meetings we hold now for the New Way. Why are we important? Why are we, the Palestinians, important everywhere in the world?

Most of the time they do not give me the right answer. The right answer is that we are not important at all. You, the Jews, are important. We were lucky that we fell into a conflict with you. That is not a joke. It is true.

And then I start telling them: imagine now what happens if we can change this relationship from a conflict into cooperation. If we become partners and not enemies, we gain a thousand times over.

(At this point one of Samer’s children walks into the frame.)

Boris: There is a partner for you. Number nine in the family. Say hi.

Samer: I have a big family. Nine children.

The settlers are much more connected to this land and to the people than people who sit and drink espresso in cafés in Tel Aviv.

“Please, defend the whole border”

Samer: You talked about why you should trust Palestinians on security. We need to trust you. I can imagine a Palestinian state next to the State of Israel that signs some kind of military protocol in which we ask the army of Israel to protect the borders of both states together.

Why do I need to buy weapons? I do not have the ability to buy. You have them. Where would I buy them from? I need to rely on you. Please, defend the whole border. I give you, with full willingness, the right to defend the entire territory together, under agreements between the two sides, so that you hold the security of all of us together.

If we can imagine things outside the box, we will find things that make you more open, because you no longer have the Palestinian challenge, which, as you said, we live with you. And if we get rid of that challenge, all the military and intelligence capacity of the State of Israel focuses on the real enemy of both of us, the one sitting in Tehran and in other places. We move out of the frame of an Israeli-Palestinian conflict into the frame of a conflict between the moderates and the extremists in the Middle East, with both of us on the side of the moderates, dealing with the challenges that come from the extreme sides.

It is possible. But first we need a leadership on our side that can reach the Israeli side, that can talk to the hearts and minds of Israelis, that can build trust, top down. Every Palestinian prime minister has to work hard to make the Israeli prime minister his best friend. Out of that kind of relationship, out of that friendship and that trust, we can build a system of trust between the two sides, in all the institutions of both sides, between the two peoples, and in the media of both sides.

What Israelis see, and what Palestinians see

Samer: I know it is hard for you now to look at the Palestinian side in a positive way. Two days ago I saw a report on Channel 11 about Gaza, by a correspondent who is also a friend, someone I know and respect. Ten, twelve minutes, and it only talked about Hamas in Gaza. But there are many other things in Gaza. There are families. There are people. There is a kind of hard life that the Israeli public also needs to know about, not only the security challenges.

And we, as Palestinians, must not go on looking at Israel only in a negative way. There are many positive things on the Israeli side that we have to explain to the Palestinian people through the media.

Where I did not expect the opening to come from

Boris: I get infected by your optimism. On the other hand, I am for the vision you are describing, but I find it hard to see it happening, because honestly nothing good has happened here for a long time. If it does happen, I will be very glad. But the vision you talk about, building trust, is a matter of years.

I read a book a while ago by Josef Avesar, an Israeli-born lawyer in California who works on divorce cases and who has a plan for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Israeli Palestinian Confederation. His point is that when couples divorce, the real estate, which here is the territory, is usually the least important thing. There is far more insult, far more emotional damage, and his solution deals with all of that before it deals with the real estate. It is generations of work. But something has to be done, because the state we are in now is not good.

Samer: Certainly. Look, last week I had an experience. For the first time I met part of the leadership of the far right, let us say the Religious Zionism movement, people who live in the settlements. I was always afraid to talk to that part of Israel. I did not believe anything would come out of it.

Last week I found out that I was wrong. I think the chance that peace comes from there is bigger, because the settlers, the residents of Judea and Samaria, are much more connected to this land and to the people than people who sit and drink espresso in cafés in Tel Aviv. And there I found common ground. There I found shared people. There I found that religion does not push us apart, that religion can bring us closer, that there are many similar things on both sides. That is exactly where we have to focus, on the groups that could be spoilers. If we start talking there with an open heart and an open mind, we can move forward.

A smarter two-state solution

Samer: I talked about our shared right in this land. To be more precise, the historical connection of the Jewish people to this land was more in Judea and Samaria, in the West Bank. The Palestinian collective memory of this land is more the Gaza coast, Ashdod, Ashkelon, Haifa, Acre. The two-state solution gives you the coast and gives us Judea and Samaria.

But there is nothing to be done, this is demography. We are here, you are there. Any two-state solution has to be a smart solution that does not cut anybody off.

I sometimes ask myself why we should be demanding that the settlements be dismantled. Maybe we should be asking that they stay. Israel has 20 percent Arab citizens. The State of Palestine will keep 20 percent of the Jews who live there. But we are the state that serves their security. They live under Palestinian law, we respect them, we give them guarantees, we make sure everything is fine and in order for them, so that they live here, go to work in Tel Aviv in the morning, and come home to Hebron and to Beit El. Why do we need to dismantle the settlements? So maybe we should look for a smart model of two states. Anyone who does not feel like staying inside a Palestinian state and wants to leave, leaves voluntarily. Everyone who wants to stay in any case, stays.

We have to respect that symbolic connection, that poetic connection, that each one has to this land. And also respect that you need to live in your Jewish state, and we need to live in our national state, with dignity, and with very strong cooperation on everything.

The last word

Boris: If that happens I will certainly be glad, and I very much hope we go in that direction, because the direction you are drawing is really good. I want to live in a world like that, where we live together in peace and nobody is cutting off anybody’s hands, and then we can start really arguing about hummus and about food.

Until then, thank you very much. I think that two or three months after both election cycles I will bother you again and ask for your time, and we will analyze what happened and whether we are closer to your beautiful vision or actually further away from it.

Samer: Agreed.

The full episode, in Hebrew, is here: https://youtu.be/XzPBGczt4vY. The previous conversation with Samer is here.

I wrote about it at the time, in When “a pile of shit” is a compliment. The short version, for those who will not click. The talk was about the three most common mistakes in data visualization. The first mistake was about attitude and the third was about not writing conclusions, so I had an A and a C, and I wanted a B. The second mistake was about a low signal-to-noise ratio, and the best B word I could find for noise was “bullshit.” I was not sure I was allowed to put that on a slide, so I asked my colleagues in Slack. Four out of four said go ahead. Martin, who ran the data division at Automattic, added that for a non-native English speaking audience, American coinages like “bullshit” come across funnier and less aggressive than they do to some American ears.

So the slide said “Cut the bullshit,” half the data division had watched me agonize over it, and when the photo of that talk went up, the poo emoji was not an insult. It was a callback. It was affectionate.

The lesson I drew in 2018 was a human one: do not jump to conclusions, assume the best intentions.

I still believe that. There is now a reader in the thread who cannot do it.

The reader who was not in the room

Ask yourself what a language model would make of that thread if you handed it over today. Not the whole story. Just what is in the channel: a photo of a man presenting, and one pile-of-poo reaction. There is exactly one reading available, and a model will produce it fluently and with total confidence. Negative sentiment. Mild ridicule of the speaker.

It would not be malfunctioning. It would be doing exactly what I asked, with what I gave it. The joke lived in context the model never had, and here is the part that bothers me: unlike Sirin, or Martin, or anyone else in that channel, it has no way to notice that something is missing. A human who does not get a joke usually feels the gap. They ask, or they hedge, or they let it go. A model does not feel the gap. It fills it.

I published something a few days ago about my folder of markdown files, and I described the failure mode of an AI assistant like this: it “confidently does the wrong thing, because it guessed at something it should have asked you about.” Guessed. That is the same word I would use for the poo emoji, read cold. The 2018 story turns out to have been an early, funnier version of the thing I now spend my working day managing.

Context stopped being a courtesy

What changed between 2018 and now is not the technology. It is who is obliged to supply the missing piece.

In 2018 I could reasonably expect other people to supply it themselves. Everyone in that channel had watched the poll happen. If somebody had missed it, they could ask, or they could extend me the benefit of the doubt. That is what “assume the best intentions” actually asks of a reader: fill a gap you can see, using goodwill.

You cannot ask a model for goodwill. It has none, and it will not tell you it is short of anything. So the obligation moves. Context is no longer a courtesy I extend to a colleague who missed the meeting. It is an input I owe to a reader who was never at the meeting, never will be, and will answer anyway.

That is the actual reason my Claude setup is a folder of boring text files instead of a cleverer prompt. Those files are the poll. They are Martin’s note about non-native speakers. They are the thing that makes “Cut the bullshit” read as a joke about signal-to-noise instead of as a man swearing at strangers in Barcelona.

So write down the thing everybody knows

That is the whole technique, and it is much less satisfying than a clever prompt. Write down the thing you assume everyone knows, and put it where the machine can read it.

The test I use: if a competent stranger read only the artifact, and none of the conversation around it, what would they get wrong? Then go and write that into the artifact.

I might be over-reading my own emoji here. It is perfectly possible that the right answer is to keep the jokes in Slack, where the people who get them live, and to stop feeding threads to machines that were never invited to the party. I have some sympathy for that view. But the threads are being fed to the machines whether or not I approve, and nobody is asking me first.

Would your last six months of Slack survive a stranger reading it with total confidence and no context? Mine would not. I suspect yours would not either.

Screenshots from the original 2018 post. The poo, as established, was a compliment.

The prediction of the end of programming is not new.

I’ve grown suspicious of it, because I’ve now read it with a date attached, and the earliest date is 1959.

Here is the pattern. Every ten or fifteen years since then, someone announces that programmers are about to become unnecessary. The pitch barely changes: the machine now speaks your language, so the specialist in the middle can go home. And every time, two things happen that don’t fit the prediction. The specific kind of programming under attack really does fade. And the number of people who program goes up. Not sideways. Up.

The people who make this prediction are not stupid, and they are not dilettantes. They are experienced industry leaders, academics, and journalists who have spent their lives around programming, and they are genuinely convinced the end is near. That is what makes the pattern worth taking seriously rather than laughing off.

And still, the prediction keeps being half right in the way that makes it feel completely wrong.

1959: the machine will speak English, so you won’t need a programmer

COBOL was designed in 1959 and 1960 by a committee that, as the record puts it, “agreed unanimously that more people should be able to program.” The language was to “make maximal use of English” and be “suitable for inexperienced programmers,” even at the expense of power. That’s why COBOL reads like MOVE amount TO total instead of a row of symbols. The hope riding on top of it was louder than the spec: if the code looks like English, a manager could read it, maybe even write it, and the programming priesthood would lose its monopoly.

Sixty-five years later, managers still do not write COBOL. But plenty of people who would never have called themselves programmers ended up writing something. The circle of people who program got wider. It did not close.

1965 and 1967: the machine will think, so it will program itself

Then the general optimism arrived. In 1965 Herbert Simon wrote that “machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work that a man can do”. In 1967 Marvin Minsky wrote that “within a generation … the problems of creating ‘artificial intelligence’ will be substantially solved”. Writing programs was quietly filed under “any work a man can do.” If the machine was about to do everything, it was certainly about to do this.

1973: then the money stopped

The trouble with a promise that large is that it can be defunded in a single document. In 1973 James Lighthill delivered a report to the British Science Research Council that concluded, flatly, “in no part of the field have the discoveries made so far produced the major impact that was then promised.” The British government used it to end most academic AI funding. The first AI winter followed. The lesson I take from Lighthill is not that the skeptics were right. It’s that overselling has a bill, and when it comes due, the honest work gets cut alongside the hype.

1981: application development without programmers

The eighties opened with the promise moved into the product name. In 1981 James Martin published a book literally titled Application Development Without Programmers, which is where the term “fourth-generation language” got its formal start. The same year, a small British company shipped a program called The Last One. Its creator explained the name: it was meant to be “the last human-produced program that needs to be written.” You picked options from menus and it generated the BASIC for you.

What actually came of the 4GL wave was SQL, spreadsheets, and report builders. Every one of those let more people do more without a programmer. Every one of those also created new categories of work, and demand for programmers kept climbing straight through the decade that promised to end it.

1982: an entire country bet on it

Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry launched the Fifth Generation Computer Systems project in 1982: roughly ¥57 billion, about 320 million dollars, over ten years, to build machines that reasoned in logic and talked to people in something close to natural language. It is now generally filed as a commercial failure. Ordinary hardware from Sun and Intel outran the specialized machines before the decade was out.

1987: “a profession with no future”

The feeling that this time is finally different is not new either, and I have a clipping to prove it. On Friday, 4 September 1987, the Israeli daily Maariv ran a piece under the headline “תכנות - מקצוע ללא עתיד”: programming, a profession with no future.

Maariv, Friday 4 September 1987. The headline reads “programming, a profession with no future.”

It quotes a specialist, Ezra Ben-Kochav, making a case that would sound at home in any 2026 keynote. “The programming component in systems keeps shrinking over the years,” he says. The cause, in his telling, is the arrival of fourth-generation languages, “artificial-intelligence languages,” and application generators, tools that demand far less professional knowledge and cut a project’s development time in half. Operating systems, he adds, are getting friendly enough that you need less skill to run them.

Then comes the line that made me keep the clipping. Ben-Kochav cites studies from the United States showing that fewer and fewer students were choosing to study computer science, and names the reason: the shrinking demand for people in the field. I read that, thought of the drop in my own department, and then checked the date. Thirty-nine years ago. In the decades that followed, the profession it was burying became one of the largest and best paid on earth.

The tell: even the replacement was called an apprentice

Here is the detail that convinced me the pattern is real and not just a run of bad marketing. The most serious academic attempt to automate programming in that era, MIT’s Programmer’s Apprentice (Charles Rich and Richard Waters, from the mid-1970s on), was explicitly designed as an assistant, not a replacement. The apprentice handled the mundane details; the human made the higher-level connections and checked the apprentice’s work.

That is almost exactly the division of labor I have with my AI assistant today. The people who understood the problem best, forty years ago, landed on “apprentice,” not “successor.” They had the right word the whole time.

What the numbers actually did

In 2000 the two occupations were the same size, about 700,000 workers each. By 2019 “software developer” had grown to 1.71 million while “computer programmer” fell to 425,000. They are related but distinct jobs: a developer analyzes needs, designs the software, and builds it; a programmer writes code to a design someone else produced. Source: BLS Current Population Survey (full-time wage and salary workers), via FRED. The developer series was retired after 2019 in a reclassification; BLS counts about 1.7 million software developers in 2024.

This is the part that makes the whole cycle legible, once you notice that “programmer” and “developer” are not the same job. A computer programmer, in the way the statistics count it, writes code to a design somebody else handed over. A software developer figures out what to build, then builds it. The narrow role is the one that’s dying: it stood at 121,200 jobs in 2024, which Fortune reported is the lowest level since 1980.

So the work didn’t disappear, and it didn’t simply change its name badge. It moved up a level. The job of turning a finished spec into code, the part a machine can most plausibly take, shrank. The job of deciding what the spec should be, and standing behind it, grew to about 1.7 million software developers, median wage $133,080, with another 15 percent growth projected over the decade. Every wave of “no more programmers” took aim at the narrow role and kept missing the broad one, because the broad one is mostly deciding, and deciding is the part nobody has automated.

So is this time different?

Yes and no.

The yes is real: the machine genuinely writes the code now, in a way no 4GL ever managed. But look at what writing the code always was. Writing the syntax was hard the way a chore is hard, real skill and real hours, and easy to mistake the effort for the essence. It was a “chore,” though, not the “mission.” The mission was to decide, exactly, what the program should do, and to answer for that decision. That is the programming, and it is the one thing sixty-five years of tooling never took off our hands.

Read the whole list again through that lens and it stops being a run of failed predictions and turns into a single, patient process. Each wave automated a chore and left the mission alone. COBOL took the chore of writing assembly. The 4GLs took the chore of hand-building the same forms and reports. The AI is taking the chore of writing the syntax. None of them touched the mission, because the mission was never the typing. The prediction keeps failing for one reason: from the outside, the chore looks like the job. It is the visible, effortful, teachable part, so people mistake it for the point. It never was the point.

In my own week, the AI’s most valuable move isn’t writing the code. It’s the command that stops and makes me state my assumptions and answer “why” before it builds anything. That is specifying: pinning down what the thing should do precisely enough that even a machine can’t wander off. Specifying is the mission with the typing stripped away, and no wave of tooling ever made it easier.

If I had to bet on where the job goes next, I’d bet up, not out. The work that grows is the work closest to deciding what to build: naming the problem, choosing the shape of the system, drawing the lines between the pieces. We already have a word for the person who does that, “architect,” and it’s telling that the people whose job is to classify jobs keep inventing new versions of it. The US occupational taxonomy had no “database architect” code until 2018; it added one because the role had quietly become real. I’d expect more of that. Not “no more programmers,” but the center of gravity of the work sliding toward whoever decides the structure, whatever we end up calling them. Will we keep calling them “software developers”? “programmers”? “architects”? “product managers”? I don’t know. But the work is moving up the abstraction ladder, and the machine keeps taking the rung below. It writes more of the code every year; a person still has to be accountable for what the code is for.

A schematic, not data. Each wave of tooling automates the rung below, and the human work climbs to the next one. The top rung, deciding what to build, is the one that has never automated. The “architect” rung is my guess at the next name for it, not a measured trend.

So I might be completely wrong. Everyone on this list was certain, and most of them were wrong, which means certainty is clearly not the safe side of this bet. What I’ll commit to is narrower. I’ve now watched the “no more programmers” headline get published, with a straight face, roughly once a decade since 1959, over a line that never stopped climbing. The next time it runs, notice that you’ve read it before. Then ask for better odds than “this time for sure.”

The short version.

You’ve paired with an AI coding assistant by now. You know the two faces of it. For ten minutes it’s the sharpest junior engineer you’ve ever worked with. Then it confidently does the wrong thing, because it guessed at something it should have asked you about, and you spend the next hour unwinding the guess.

People assume the fix for that is a better model, or a cleverer prompt. Mine wasn’t. My Claude super tool is a folder of boring markdown files.

Over the past months I took the software-engineering habits I’d otherwise have to remember to apply, and wrote them down as Claude Code slash commands. Now the habits run themselves. I put the whole set on GitHub as claude-shipyard. Here is what a normal day with it looks like.

The plan is where the thinking happens

Got an issue to fix? I run /make-plan.

It explores the current state of the code, builds a plan, and actively hunts for open questions. When it finds one, it doesn’t guess, which is the whole point. It lays out the alternatives with their pros, cons, and implications, and lets me choose.

And the top of every plan lists the assumptions we’re making. That sounds like a formality. It isn’t. A wrong assumption doesn’t announce itself. It sits there quietly and turns into a wrong step three commits later, when it’s expensive to undo. Reading the assumptions first is the cheapest bug-catching I do all day. State your premises before you build on them. It’s the least glamorous idea in Jean-luc Doumont’s toolkit and the one I lean on most.

One command to start clean

/git-work-on-issue takes it from the very top. It marks the GitHub issue as “in progress”, prepares a worktree and a branch, then calls /make-plan for me.

One command, and I’m working in an isolated checkout with the plan already drafted. My main branch never gets touched. If the whole thing turns out to be a bad idea, I throw the worktree away and nothing else knows it happened.

Brainstorming is just interrogation

Not everything starts as a tidy issue. Sometimes it starts as a vague “I think we should build X, but I haven’t thought it through.”

For that I have /brainstorm, and /brainstorm interrogates me. It opens with “why”, and then it asks, and asks, and asks. Question after question, each one narrower than the last, until everything is clear. It’s slower than I’d like. That slowness is the point.

The reason I keep it around is that the relentless questioning is the only reliable way I know to surface the unknown unknowns: the decisions I didn’t even know I hadn’t made yet. Those are the ones that sink projects. Not the hard problems you can see coming, the small ones you never noticed you were quietly assuming.

From a fuzzy idea to merged PRs

The output of a /brainstorm doesn’t just sit in a document. It can become a GitHub milestone, split into issues. From there, /milestone-plan and /milestone-run take the whole pile and work it one issue at a time: plan, implement, review, merge, next. I go from “I have a fuzzy idea” to “there are merged PRs” without personally babysitting every step in between.

The unglamorous end, where the code actually gets good

The interesting part of software is the thinking. The part that decides whether the code is any good is the boring stuff at the end, and the boring stuff at the end is exactly what I skip when I’m tired. So I wrote that down too.

• /git-pre-pr self-reviews the diff before I open a PR: tests, leftover secrets, sloppy exception handling, the things I’d be embarrassed by in review.
• /gh-code-review reads the review comments back to me grouped by severity, so I fix what matters before I go bikeshed a variable name.
• /git-pr-merge merges and cleans up the branches and worktrees behind it, so I don’t leave a graveyard of stale branches.

Why a folder of text files beats a better prompt

Here’s the part I didn’t expect. None of this is clever AI. There’s no fine-tuning and no secret prompt hiding in the repo. It’s years of software-development practice, written down as plain markdown.

What the markdown buys me is that the discipline stops depending on me being disciplined. On a good day I’d remember to list my assumptions, question my own plan, and review my diff before pushing. On a tired day, a Friday-afternoon day, I wouldn’t. The commands don’t have tired days. They carry the process so I don’t have to.

That, for me, is where AI-assisted coding actually pays off. Not a smarter model. A model that runs your process, the same way every time, including the times you would have cut the corner yourself.

The caveat

This fits how I work. It might not fit how you work, and some of these commands encode opinions you’d reasonably disagree with. I like worktrees; plenty of good engineers find them more trouble than they’re worth. So don’t adopt it wholesale. It’s all open source. Read it, take the two or three ideas that map onto habits you already have, and leave the rest.

Steal what’s useful.