Why I've Been Thinking About You've Got Mail (1998)

You've Got Mail (1998) is one of my wife's favorite films. I love it as well. I honestly think its Nora Ephron's strongest work (I will argue if you think Sleepless in Seattle is stronger; I will not argue if you think How Harry Met Sally is stronger - that's an incredibly valid opinion). I'm not here to pontificate on the pop cultural history of it - though I do love that this is the third cinematic rendition of a (at the time) 60 year old Hungarian play.

If you have never seen it and have the time, I recommend watching it before continuing - it really is a good film. I am about to spoil certain plot points. You've been warned!

Gotta love a meet-cute that has kids in it.

In the film, Meg Ryan plays Kathleen Kelly, who runs the independent children's book store, The Shop Around the Corner. It was her mother's dream, but its very easy to see that Kathleen happily inherited that dream - that store is her life and she's passionate about getting kids to read. 

Enter Fox Books.

Sadly, a big Barnes & Noble style megabookstore, Fox Books, is opening up just around the corner from The Shop Around the Corner. The competent heir to that empire is Joe Fox, played by Tom Hanks. They meet online and start an "at first" friendly conversation that flirts, despite them each having their own love interest.

But I'm not here to pontificate about the "will they won't they" either. I was thinking about near the end of the film, just when Kathleen has internalized that both she and The Shop Around the Corner have lost the battle against Fox Books. Defeated, she decides to finally check out the competition. We get a bit of a montage as Kathleen explores the labyrinthine store. It's massive and has maybe every book you could look for. If you can find it.

Enter the exhausted mom asking an underpaid store clerk "hey do you know about the ballet shoes book?" I feel for this clerk. He has to be a generalist at best, and "do you know the ballet shoes book" is not a lot to go off of. He's flustered. Kathleen overhears the clerk as the mom tries to explain it as best as she can. The clerk still shrugs.

Kathleen can't help but jump in and save the clerk. She tells the mom exactly what book she needs, the name of the author, and explains to the clerk that its from a series of books for kids focusing on the books. The mom looks eternally grateful and the clerk looks more relieved than anything that the situation has resolved and he can get back to doing something else. For Kathleen it's an emotionally draining moment and we see Meg Ryan heartbreakingly perform it to perfection. She had spent a large portion of her adult life in a specialty of helping kids find the book that could help spark a lifelong passion. She has a near encyclopedic comprehension and boundless love for this genre of books. And she's been replaced by a store that can't pay their employees enough to care, while the Fox family is ridiculously wealthy.

Reader, I will admit that I got emotionally both thinking about this prompt for this week's blog and even writing it. I feel for Kathleen. I actually have that passion for programming and maintaining codebases. It wasn't what I started out with for my career and, honestly, became a defense mechanism of "well if I'm going to be doing this for my career, I might as well find a way to enjoy it." And my thoughts on stewardship are best left for another blog post - but know that I'm a person who is actually pretty good at taking up a web application of a particular language, cleaning it up, and making it livable.

Enter Claude.

I hate Claude. Not just on the abstract of "this is the avatar for a technology that is killing this world in numerous ways." I have had to work with Claude for work. I gave it a shot. And it hurt to work with. I didn't like what was happening with my code and I could feel cognitive decline. I am in a privileged position as a Senior Developer that I can simply go "I will not work with this" and not get fired (yet) or laid off (again). But I now have to review Claude code made by non-developers that ask Claude to do something and then just shovel the code in front of me. It's over-engineered, it ignores existing code, and even the known fascist and Shopify CEO, Tobias Lutke is saying that developers are making "slop grenades" with AI. Claude doesn't and can not know the codebase. Code can be beautiful. It can be elegant. It can, believe it or not, have a soul. Work with code enough and you can pick up from the syntax and might even be able to tell the mood of the developer when they wrote it - did they enjoy making it.

It's not just codebases - it's everything generative AI touches. An internet search of Google or Duck Duck Go used to be useful - for a wonderful, few years, we really had the Library of Alexandria at our fingertips. Now its all being shoveled into the algorithm and you're expected to search by asking it.

I was originally going to push this to an analogy of Fox Books... but I can't. It's worse than Fox Books. At least in Fox Books the mom can still find the ballet shoes book. Now, it's all been ground up into an unsatisfying slop slurry to sadly slurp from.

Yes, I added the alliteration to cheer myself up cause I am bummed that this is what life is.

But Kathleen moves on. She finds other ways to use her expertise. She's optimistic about her future. It helps that she's about to hookup with a multimillionaire.