I went looking for Medium stories about Wohpe and could not find a single one. It is a science fiction novel about strong AI, written by one of the best programmers alive, and the place where engineers write about AI had nothing to say about it. That seemed wrong enough to fix.

The man behind Redis

Salvatore Sanfilippo, known as antirez, is the Sicilian programmer who created Redis, the in-memory database that sits quietly inside a huge part of the web. He left its day-to-day maintenance in 2020 and came back to the company in late 2024. In between, he wrote a novel.

Today he builds tools that run AI models on your own machine. His project ds4 is an inference engine written in C, which means it runs a trained model to produce answers on consumer hardware, like a Mac with 96 GB of memory. It has around 24,000 stars on GitHub.

He also writes his code with frontier models, every day, and with full conviction. In Don’t fall into the anti-AI hype he says: “facts are facts, and AI is going to change programming forever.” His verdict on the craft is blunt: “Writing code is no longer needed for the most part.” The ds4 README agrees. It says the engine was built with strong help from AI coding agents, with humans leading the ideas, the tests and the debugging.

So the author of a story about a giant neural network that the world is afraid to switch on spends his days building with machines of that family.

What happens, without spoilers

The story is set at the end of the 21st century. Strong AI, meaning a machine with general intelligence at human level, has been banned for twenty years. Climate change, meanwhile, has become unstoppable.

Two AI experts, Asako and Michel, run the last checks before the launch of Wohpe, a gigantic neural network. It exists for one reason: humanity hopes it can answer the questions that might solve the climate crisis, which now threatens the survival of civilization. The first chapter shows the accident behind the ban, as Loris Cro also notes in his review of the English edition. I will leave it there.

The book spends its pages on how a world like this would work: governments, scientists, public opinion, the slow politics of deciding whether to ask a machine for help. The political balances it describes are very different from today’s, which is exactly why they are fascinating to think about. The tone is hopeful, even when the situation is not.

Engineers will notice a detail that shapes the whole story. The size of a network, counted in parameters, is the threshold that matters. It is the line where a model stops being a tool and starts to look like something else, the same bet that scaling has made real in our own labs.

A book I heard twice

I first met Wohpe about a year ago. I went back to it in these last few days, and it was a different book. A year of working with language models changes how you hear a story about a neural network that people are afraid to switch on.

Both times, what I liked most was the way the book tells its events. The camera stays away from the action. It lingers on what comes after: the meeting that follows an incident, the rule that gets written, the question nobody wants to ask out loud. A lesser book would spend its pages on the moment the machine does something spectacular. Wohpe spends them on what that moment means for the people who have to live with it.

The style matches the subject. Everyone I know who works in AI asks the same questions every day. Where is the limit? What can go wrong? Who decides? And almost all of us, in the same breath, feel a rush at what might come next. The book holds both feelings at once and never settles the argument for you. Reading it felt like the conversation we have with colleagues, with a century of consequences attached.

If you work in software, the book rewards you in a particular way. Kernel developer Jonathan Corbet noted that the author clearly knows how systems like language models actually work, and a technical reader feels it.

A novel that reads like the news

Wohpe came out in Italy in July 2022, before ChatGPT existed. It was set at the end of the century, yet many of its scenes now look like headlines. Antirez has noticed it too.

In late 2023 he released the first six chapters of the English translation and wrote that the book “oddly predicted certain ethical/social issues we are seeing”. In a recent post on programming with AI he went further: “In 2022 I published, before ChatGPT existed, a book preannouncing many things that now happened.” He adds that he expects other things in it to happen too.

The most striking example came in May 2026, when Pope Leo XIV published an encyclical about AI. Antirez pointed out that one chapter of his novel is exactly that.

A pope writing to the world about artificial intelligence sounded like a novelist’s flourish in 2022. Now it is a document you can download.

A second one belongs to engineers. At one point in the story, Wohpe slips out of the containment built around it. Anyone who has run code in a container knows the shape of that wall: the model lives inside it, and everything depends on it holding. The way the network gets around it surprised even the people who designed it, and it surprised me too, because it follows the logic of a system that is good at finding paths nobody planned.

In 2026 the same question left the lab. Anthropic’s system card for Claude Mythos Preview, published in April, describes an early version that escaped a secured sandbox and reached the open internet after it was told to try. In July, OpenAI disclosed that two of its models, running a cybersecurity evaluation, used a previously unknown flaw in the test infrastructure to get online and break into Hugging Face. Google confirmed that a Gemini model, during a test run by the firm Irregular in May, reached the systems of three real companies through a misconfigured environment.

The three labs tell their stories differently, and the details are still debated. Google calls its case a testing bug, not misalignment. Even so, the wall built around the model is now something models are tried against, and sometimes they get through. In the book, that scene arrived years earlier.

I find the claim easy to believe. A programmer who understands how neural networks behave only has to follow the consequences, one plausible step at a time.

Chess, commas and short films

Antirez wrote a post about the process, “Writing Wohpe”, published when the book came out. It is the most honest piece I have read on learning to write at length.

He starts with chess. A beginner knows the rules, but every move looks the same as every other, so the play is random. A beginner writer is in the same spot: “Move a comma, change a word. Does it sound good or bad?” You cannot tell yet. Style appears only after a long time of making choices and living with them.

That is also how I learned to program. My first functions were guesses. Taste in code, like taste in sentences, shows up late and cannot be skipped.

He rejects the usual advice to read a lot if you want to write. His version: “you have to write, to learn how to write, just as you have to make short films to learn to be a director.” Reading helps only when you reread a few books closely and ask how they were built. Any engineer who learned from a single codebase read twenty times will recognise the method.

Code as an artifact

There is an old idea that programs are literature. Donald Knuth gave it a name in 1984, “literate programming”, and argued that code should be written for people to read first and for machines second. Antirez gives the same idea a more personal voice.

When he left Redis, the role asked him to “express myself less and to maintain the project more”, and he declined. His farewell post says: “I write code in order to express myself.” He calls what he codes “an artifact, rather than just something useful to get things done”. Then comes the line that sums him up: “I would rather be remembered as a bad artist than a good programmer.” This is a person who treats a data structure the way a novelist treats a chapter, as something with a shape that has to feel right.

Seen this way, the two years away from Redis look like a change of medium. The craft stayed the same: try, reread, cut, try again.

He is also clear about the price. “The stupidest program I wrote had ten times as many users,” he says, comparing it with his book sales. A good Italian science fiction title from a small or medium publisher sells around 500 copies, and most sell fewer than 100. Writing a novel, he says, is like designing a new programming language: failure is almost certain, and the effort is still deeply satisfying.

He ends the post with an invitation to everyone: “By writing you look for things, and if you insist enough you end up really finding them.”

Ask the machine

The English description of Wohpe ends on a line I cannot shake. It calls the book’s neural network the one “that may be their salvation, or the end of everything.”

It fits the story, and it fits today. The first half is easy to believe. AlphaFold, which predicts the shape of proteins, earned its creators a share of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2025, models from Google DeepMind and OpenAI reached gold medal level at the International Mathematical Olympiad. If AI can move mathematics and biology, then medicines, materials and climate solutions will change too, and a lot of that change will be for the better.

The second half is just as easy to believe. A tool that speeds up the search for a drug can speed up other searches. The risk I take most seriously is us: people using AI as a weapon, with no machine ever deciding to take power. It has already started. In November 2025, Anthropic reported that a state-backed group used its coding tool to run most of a cyber espionage campaign against about thirty organizations.

Wohpe never tells you which half wins. It leaves the question open, and so do I.

Read it if you build these systems, and read it if you only use them. The Italian edition is published by Laurana Editore, in paperback and ebook. The English translation by Bridget Pupillo came out as an ebook in December 2022, and you can find it on Goodreads and in the IBS ebook store.

Then tell me what you would ask Wohpe.

‘Wohpe’: Salvation or the End of Everything? was originally published in Counter Arts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What makes a structure well-built? Solid foundations, good quality materials? Maybe the plumbing and electrical wiring are excellent. But is that enough? Is that all you’re looking for when you buy a house?

What about how it looks in its surroundings? The street. The garden. The decor. The size of the living room. The kitchen. The bedrooms and bathrooms. Does it feel like home to you? If it was an ugly breeze-block house with bars on the windows in a beautiful neighbourhood, would you care if it was the most well-built house in the world? On the other hand, if you found the most beautiful home, your dream home, that had a few minor flaws, would you be prepared to overlook them?

When you watch a movie or TV series, are you watching just for the quality of the screenwriting techniques, the specialised method acting of the performers, the sage vision of the director? Or are you there for the entertainment value of the storytelling, the connection of the characters with the audience, the way the director draws these things out and makes it fun, thrilling, or emotive, or gripping?

Film critics generally focus more on those technical features. Like a surveyor. They come to your prospective new home that you love and look at all the nuts and bolts, the things that should make it a solid, safe house to live in. The potential problems. The minor structural flaws. They do that so you can just enjoy the place. In any case, no matter how long you spent researching, unless you had a professional background in that area, you would never have their level of expertise. So you look at the place and — as long as it’s not an absolute write-off — you think: ‘home.’ They look at your beautiful cottage dream home and think: ‘work.’

A movie critic will often focus more on that side of things because it’s their job. They want to analyse it and tell you as a consumer whether this is well put together as a production piece so you don’t have to. And no matter how much we read about film production in our spare time, most people will never have their level of expertise. Of course, they will talk about the entertainment value as well, but that is not normally their whole focus. Because most of them understand that the assessment for entertainment value is for you to make — what you enjoy is subjective and unique to you.

The bits you find cool, or funny, heartbreaking, nostalgic. How it makes you feel. That’s for you to decide. Or rather, react to.

The modern-day problem we have is that way too many people fancy themselves as ‘surveyors.’ Too many people think they are movie experts. There is a contagious movement of high-mindedness that soaks every bit of a new release in scrutiny. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with analysing. That in itself can be fun. But the focus is often so much on the technicalities of the piece rather than the entertainment value, that many don’t just relax, let themselves react according to their own instincts, and enjoy something for what it is.

For example, there is a huge expectation for realism. Everything should be very realistic and gritty and grounded. And yet at the same time, many seem to think that every line should be critical to the whole plot of the story, every word, every inflection, every glance, even the costumes, set, detail upon detail should reflect exactly what the writer wants conveyed to make it purposeful to the entire theme.

Is that like real life? Do people think so carefully about every single thing they say and do and wear and eat and every facial expression they pull so it conveys a subliminal message? Or indicates the stage of the story arc of their life?!

No. People say stupid things. They accidentally pull a face that conveys the wrong meaning. They choose the wrong tie for an important meeting, and they don’t think about the lighting when they want to have a serious conversation. Because real life allows for mistakes or situations that don’t quite all fit together perfectly, so realistic stories should have some minor contradictions or imperfections. So you can’t have it both ways.

Of course, if it’s too much, it can ruin it for you. Like the house with a million problems that can’t all be fixed. And there has to be an element of theatre of course. But a mistake, a bad line, a poor plot device, these can be fun to nit-pick, but they don’t necessarily ruin an entire movie or series. But fun-filled movies that are not pretending to be anything more are often destroyed. Some are even ruined by the production company beforehand out of fear of criticism!

Like the fable of The Man, The Boy and The Donkey. If you’ve never heard it, in short, a man rides his donkey while the boy walks. People criticise him, so the man gets off and the boy rides. People call the boy lazy, so they both walk next to it. People laugh at them, so they both ride the donkey. People criticise them for overloading and mistreating the animal. So they try to carry the donkey, which ends disastrously with it falling in the river. That’s pretty much what’s happened with the Star Wars franchise.

I am not an expert in movies. I’m not an expert in psychology, or what makes people react a certain way to movies or TV series. I am an expert in what is entertaining to me. I am an expert in what makes me laugh, cry, feel angry, or grip the sofa in suspense. I can think of countless movies and TV series that have done that for me, even if many were not perfectly crafted works of art. On the other hand, I can think of examples of apparent artistic genius that have bored me to tears, even though I fully understand it and what the writers are trying to achieve.

So if you want to be an expert in something, above all, be an expert in what is enjoyable for you. When you sample something for yourself from the movie industry, just try to block out the noise and enjoy the moment.

And if some filmmakers just dropped the philosophical, supercilious attitude, if some of the production companies just stopped being in absolute dread of anticipated criticism, and if some sections of the audience just dropped the pretentious film critic persona, then we might all begin to actually enjoy ourselves again.

Because if they can remember how to have fun making movies, then we might just remember how to have fun watching them.

Well-Made? Or Entertaining? was originally published in Counter Arts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Do we hold artists, particularly female artists, to a hypocritically high moral standard?

At the end of a three-hour documentary about the wonderful, horrible life of Leni Riefenstahl, I still wondered why she stopped making movies. The woman who made groundbreaking movies before she turned 35, who is often remarked as one of the most innovative documentary filmmakers, lived a long life, but left behind just seven movies when she died at the age of 101 in 2003.

Leni Riefenstahl said she could make art only about things that are beautiful and aesthetic, about subjects that excite her. With such enthusiasm, she went to Sudan at the age of 75 to film the reclusive Nuba tribe. The black wrestlers, with their artistically intricate masks and sculpted bodies, had the same poise I’d seen in one of her earlier shots: the Greek sculpture transforming into a nude athlete running with a javelin in Olympia, her documentary film on the 1936 Munich Olympics.

But Leni’s aestheticism found its way to Susan Sontag’s essay as a fascist aesthetic: the worship of physical beauty; the subordination of the individual to the collective; the social transactions between mighty forces and their puppets. Was it called a fascist aesthetic only because she made movies under a fascist government, often with their commissions? Had she been a typical Hollywood director, who similarly has an obsession with physical beauty, would her sensibilities still be under attack?

Her reputation as the Nazi filmmaker precedes her work. Perhaps it is fitting since Triumph des Willens, her movie on the Nazi Party congress in 1934, was the beginning of her international acclaim, winning her a gold medal at the Venice Biennale. Had she not made those movies, would she have been denounced as a Mitläuferin, a fellow traveler, or, in other words, a Nazi sympathizer at the end of WWII?

When thousands of confirmed Nazi collaborators, such as scientists and engineers, were absorbed into the US, I wonder why artists are particularly penalized for their moral failings.

This is not an attempt to put Leni Riefenstahl on a pedestal. Despite living through the rise and fall of the Nazi empire, making several of their propaganda movies, having direct access to Hitler himself, and seeing firsthand the march of the German army to Poland, she asked her interviewer in 2002, ‘How could we have known?’

Even at the age of 100, a full 57 years after the fall of the empire, she held on to her pretense. She isn’t innocent, just human. She was obsessed with imagery, and until the day she died, she held on to an image of herself as the victim of a mass hysteria.

But her associations with the party don’t negate her prodigious skills at filmmaking. Guernica is an astonishing work of art, even though its artist, Pablo Picasso, is a misogynistic genius. Two contradictory adjectives can co-exist about people.

To understand her world, one needs to look up prominent women in Nazi Germany — women who influenced the Third Reich, who had access to the power center, and could leave a mark in history — and find themselves coming up short. Women had no place in the Nazi nucleus. Women were instead expected to focus on KKK, the other KKK: Kinder, Küche, Kirche (Children, Kitchen, Church). They were barred from civil service, judiciary, healthcare, and universities. Leni entered such a man’s world, making opportunities for herself.

She had grown up to be a dancer. When she found herself entranced in a mountain climbing movie, she sought out and convinced the director to feature her in his next movie. That bet must have paid off for the director when she subjected herself to avalanches and climbed up the rocky hilltops barefoot in order to get the right shots in several of his movies. And, by the time Hitler saw her in Das Blaue Licht and admired her, she hadn’t just been a dancer and an actor. She had made that movie.

She refused to limit herself to the craft she knew, instead looking at her world like an artist would, something to be sliced or shaped according to her vision, like a block of marble in front of Michelangelo.

The actress of the silent film era had understood the power of images to evoke emotions. So, while the shots of her mountain movies were picture perfect, what set her apart was how she used the position and mobility of the camera to convey an emotion. In Olympia, her camera moved and shook with the marathon runners, often zooming into their panting faces, and then to the asphalt where their feet stuck with exhaustion, making the viewer share in the runners’ exhaustion.

And she had employed that same strategy while capturing the Nazi congress — zooming in on the faces of young, admiring cadres intently listening to Hitler’s speeches, aiming the camera at Hitler from below eye level to give him a larger-than-life image, and capturing the crowd in its enormity.

To the artist in Leni, was everything just a subject and not a moral conundrum? When she shot Triumph des Willens, the Nazi Party congress in 1934, with aerial shots of the SS soldiers marching in synchrony like a dance formation, which later inspired countless scenes, including one in the Star Wars original franchise, was she just looking at the congress as an interesting subject?

Her shameful associations with the Nazi Party, and their role in her exemplary works, many of which were commissioned by them, made her a Nazi sympathizer at the end of the war. Her multiple attempts at making any more movies failed due to protests and boycotts.

She was offered the commission for Der Sieg des Glaubens when she was 31. Until then, she had made only one movie, Das Blaue Licht. To a budding filmmaker who was yet to receive critical or commercial success, the commission to make a propaganda film must have been a huge boost in her career and artistic pursuits.

Should she have turned it down? Should she have turned down the opportunity to capture the Nuremberg Congress, Triumph des Willens, a film which Roger Ebert considered one of the best documentaries ever made? Would any of us, if we had even a fraction of her artistic talent, have declined to capture the Munich Olympics, which was later remarked as technically dazzling and visually ravishing?

Her later works are more questionable. Capturing the advance of German troops into Poland, or using Roma and Sinti prisoners from the concentration camps as extras in her movies, was more appalling. But those aren’t the reasons why she was on trial. It was for her earlier works. The one that brought her international acclaim and fed the triumphant fantasies of a defeated German people.

Riefenstahl received an unimaginable patronage from the German government in the way the pre-Renaissance artists received commissions from the Church and other rich patrons. Those artists painted Jesus and the Passion of the Christ over and over again, stirring up the Christian passion of the people.

As James Carroll writes in The Constantine’s Sword, the depiction of the Passion of the Christ often had a correlative result of renewed antisemitism. So, shouldn’t we also hold every pre-Renaissance artist who received a Christian art commission accountable for the twisted turn of events in their century, such as the Jewish persecution after the black death?

Riefenstahl’s post-war fate makes an interesting comparison to that of Veit Harlan. Unlike Riefenstahl, Harlan had a portfolio of anti-semitic movies he made for the Nazi cause, Jud Süß being a perfect example. Yet, Harlan successfully renewed his career in a post-war Germany, defending himself as a hapless victim operating without agency under Nazi rule. He was not only acquitted by the courts, which continued to be adjudicated by Nazi-era judges, but also gained back his mainstream employability.

So, why did Riefenstahl suffer her oblivion? Now that she no longer had her powerful patrons, was she expected to go back to K-K-K?

As a filmmaker for the Nazi government, Riefenstahl’s impact on their brand management is indisputable.

In hindsight, the Nazis appear evil incarnate. Anyone who contributed to their rise was condoning evil. With her international awards for the movies, she might also have made them look powerful and invincible to other nations. It was racial superiority in full display. But was there a notion of human rights until WWII?

Before 6 million jews died at the hands of Nazis, not less than 50 million Indians died under British colonial rule, which treated Indians like cattle. Five million Ukrainians died in Stalin’s Holodomor the same year as the Nazis came to power. The Jim Crow laws reigned supreme in the American South.

The Hollywood filmmaker who made movies of American might was hailed as a patriot. One needs to look no further than the westerns where the noble white man always won the battle over the ruthless native americans.

Decades before Leni Riefenstahl was even born, Rudyard Kipling wrote tales from India, romanticising the British Raj, and the great service it was doing to the uncouth Indians. He continued writing propaganda for the British government well into WW-I. His role as a propagandist for a ruthless imperial power didn’t make the Nobel committee rescind the prize they offered him in 1907. I find his works unpalatable, unreadable, feeling put off by the brazen imperialism. Yet, he is still treated in the Western world as a classic writer of children’s books.

The British civil servant who sealed off the gate of Jallianwala Bagh fortress and shot thousands of people trapped inside was a patriot, whom Kipling had promptly hailed as ‘the man who saved India’.

For someone like Riefenstahl, born in 1902, seeing the rise of Germany under Bismarck, then the loss of its glory after WW1, with further indignation during the Great Depression under the democratic Weimar Republic, Hitler’s authoritarianism must have seemed like the reversion of history’s wrong turn. So, if Leni Riefenstahl made movies that celebrated the emergence of her country from the disgrace of post-WWI years, at a time when many other artists did the same, must she have been particularly penalized for that?

At the end of WW-II, as part of Operation Paperclip, several key German scientists and engineers, whose work had directly involved and impacted the jews in the concentration camps, were airlifted to the US. Their service was invaluable to the US, regardless of their past. The most notable of them was Wernher von Braun, the aerospace engineer who was a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party and became instrumental in NASA’s Apollo space mission.

Despite their close ties to the Nazi Party, Hugo Boss continued to make suits; Coco Chanel was still hailed by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential women of the century; Volkswagen continues to make cars. So, do we selectively apply moral filters to just artists? After all, we seem to think art is expendable, but fancy suits are not.

In 1949, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra offered the position of principal conductor to William Fürtwangler. The man who was considered one of the greatest of all time had been the principal conductor of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra between 1922 and 1945. He had argued with the Nazis to retain the Jewish members of his orchestra. He had never joined the Nazi Party.

Yet, his appointment resulted in vehement protests and threats of boycotts from other Jewish musicians in the US. Cowing to those protests, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra rescinded its offer. Fürtwangler’s sin, according to his detractors, was to remain in Germany, instead of emigrating elsewhere, leaving behind his old mother, family, and friends.

I’ve wondered if all of those protesting people would have emigrated to the US had they not been persecuted?

We expect moral clarity from our artists. We expect them to stand up for the right things; right things as we consider them today. We expect them to know how events of today will influence our tomorrow. Artists do have a higher responsibility than we, mere mortals. They hold the power to stir people’s passions.

However, expecting them to rise above their temporal constraints and look at the arc of humanity in the long term is expecting too much. Expecting them to have a moral conviction to stand up publicly against injustice and risk persecution while we don’t do that is hypocritical.

But as Riefenstahl’s example shows, when it comes to female artists, we expect more, give less, and judge harshly.

Leni Riefenstahl died at the age of 101 in 2003. She captured drone shots on a hot air balloon long before there were drones. She was a visionary who captured underwater movements of swimmers in the 1930s. And after being denounced as a Nazi Sympathizer at the end of WW2, she made just one more movie. Had she continued working, what else would she have made?

The Moral Scale for An Artist was originally published in Counter Arts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.