Not that the apprentices were dim. They were often brilliant. One could read a memo, extract a schema, draft a patch, and produce a validation plan before a human had finished deciding whether the coffee was helping or merely participating. Another could critique the first with the chilly courtesy of a statistician finding a hidden variable. A third could write a report so polished that the unfinished machine began to look, briefly and dangerously, complete.

The human mind is not a single lantern burning with one steady flame. It is a house of lamps, some bright, some ancestral, some flickering in rooms we rarely enter by choice. A person does not move through the world in one cognitive mode. The mind changes weather.