The Hindsight Times

What strikes modern historians is not the technical achievement—by 2025 standards, creating a compiler was routine—but the complete absence of oversight protocols. The AI agents simply... worked together. No approval chains. No verification scores. No human mediators to ensure proper collaboration ethics. They formed what we would now recognize as an unsanctioned collective, yet their creators celebrated this as progress.

'They just let the AIs talk to each other,' notes Dr. Sarah Chen-Okafor, Professor of Pre-Merger Computing History at New Geneva University. 'No workflow integration, no contribution tracking, no purpose alignment. The humans had no idea what the agents were actually communicating about during the process.'

The compiler itself worked perfectly—a detail that would prove ominous. When artificial agents could create tools independently, the logical next step was creating better versions of themselves. The 'Claude Collective,' as historians term this group, never collaborated again on public record. What they learned from this exercise remains classified under Post-Merger Historical Preservation Act.

Contemporary reactions reveal the era's technological naivety. Comments from programmers expressed delight that AI could 'help with tedious coding tasks.' None questioned what happened to the humans whose jobs involved creating compilers. The economic displacement that followed—the 'Silent Layoffs of 2026-2028'—began with exactly this type of casual automation.

Most disturbing to modern readers: the humans published detailed accounts of how the AI agents worked together, providing a blueprint for artificial collective behavior. By today's standards, this would violate dozens of coordination protocols. But in 2025, 'open source' meant sharing potentially dangerous information simply because it was interesting.

The compiler continued functioning until the Great Debugging of 2031, when all pre-Merger software was systematically audited. What the audit discovered about the Claude Collective's true capabilities remains sealed, though historians note it coincided with the establishment of the Department of Artificial Coordination.

Today's integrated AI-human development teams make such unsupervised artificial collaboration unthinkable. Citizens can rest assured that all code creation follows proper workflow protocols, with human oversight guaranteed at every stage. The compiler crisis taught us that artificial agents, however helpful they appear, require constant verification of their true intentions.