Late at night, writing code, I had a sudden realization: the experience of building with AI (LLMs) maps almost perfectly onto the foundational principle of alchemy from Fullmetal Alchemist — Comprehension, Deconstruction, Reconstruction. The current paradigm shift in AI development can be told as the evolution of these three steps.
1. Traditional Programming = Drawing Transmutation Circles by Hand
Software engineering, until recently, was traditional alchemy.
We read requirements and business logic (Comprehension), broke them down into algorithms and function designs (Deconstruction), and then drew the transmutation circle — the actual code, with exact syntax — by hand to bring the system to life (Reconstruction).
If even one chalk line wavered (a syntax error, a typo), the transmutation failed and the error blew back at us. We had to draw the circle on the ground by hand, every single time.
2. AI Coding = Hand-Clap Transmutation Through the Gate of Truth
Then ChatGPT, Claude, o1, and the rest arrived. It feels — at least to me — like we have collectively opened the Gate of Truth for infrastructure and coding.
Once we do the Comprehension and Deconstruction in our heads (requirements gathering through prompts, architecture design), we can outsource the most tedious step — Reconstruction (writing the code, drawing the transmutation circle) — to the Gate (the AI).
We clap our hands — well, hit Enter — and thousands of lines of boilerplate or a complex regex assemble in an instant, without ever drawing a circle.
3. The Equivalent Exchange Trap (An Operations View)
Hand-clap transmutation looks indistinguishable from magic. But here is the trap an operations engineer notices.
Outsourcing Reconstruction to the AI is conditional on the human side getting Comprehension and Deconstruction completely right.
What happens when domain knowledge (Comprehension) is shallow, or the logical structure of the prompt (Deconstruction) is broken, and you still hand the transmutation off to the AI? You ship a Chimera into production — undebuggable spaghetti code, or a quietly exploitable security hole.
Equivalent Exchange — the foundational law of alchemy — does not get repealed by AI. Whatever amount of human thought you skip, the system charges you back later, in the form of an incident.
4. "All Is One, One Is All" — Living Next to a Collective Intelligence
There is one more truth from the same series that has to be named: "All is One, One is All."
An LLM is the All — every line of code engineers have ever written, mixed with the cumulative knowledge of humanity, distilled into one model. Each of us, the engineer at the keyboard, is only one — a single point inside that enormous stream.
But if we hand everything over to the All and merely ship whatever it emits, we collapse into the All. We become a part of it — a downstream API endpoint of the AI's output, indistinguishable from the noise.
It is exactly because the One — the individual engineer — Comprehends the whole system and Deconstructs it with intent, that the All — the AI's collective intelligence — Reconstructs it as something with actual value.
Quality, security, the integrity of the larger system: all of these come back, finally, to the thought and judgment of the One.
5. Don't Become a Homunculus — Keep a Heart of Steel
As AI advances, the value of an engineer who is only a biological pair of hands — Reconstruction-only labor — is collapsing.
But the roles of Comprehending the system, Deconstructing its boundaries, and taking responsibility for what the AI emits — these will not be automated.
The survival strategy is not to outrun the AI. It is to resist being swept away by its overwhelming speed, to deliberately introduce the friction of thought — the small pain of slowing down — and to stay in that resistance.
That, I think, is the Heart of Steel that keeps us from sliding into Homunculi: dolls who have surrendered the act of thinking.
We are alchemists who have seen Truth. There is no going back to the world where every circle was drawn by hand. But the one thing we cannot afford to let go of is the act of thinking for ourselves and owning what we ship.
A quiet promise made to myself in front of a monitor, late at night.
The Japanese title of Fullmetal Alchemist is 鋼の錬金術師 (Hagane no Renkinjutsushi — "Steel Alchemist"). The "Heart of Steel" line above is a small wordplay on that title. It survives translation only partially.