I. You Will Never Know

You can count, catalogue, describe – packages, modules, libraries, dependencies.
You can write an SBOM, the promise of code: This is what I meant to be.
And you can record an RBOM, the testimony of runtime: This is what I was when you looked at me.

But between them lies what remains unseen:
Imports that appear only when it rains.
Paths that emerge in the stillness of memory.
Versions written by chance when the build server dreams.

Some call it drift. Others call it life.

What we gain is not knowledge, but approximation –
a more honest kind of not-knowing.
For whoever observes the code already changes it,
and whoever defines it can never tell what it will load tomorrow.

Perhaps that is progress:
not believing we can grasp the flow,
but learning to understand the current that carries us.

II. And Then There Is Infrastructure

And then there is infrastructure –
the silent machinery that makes all promises possible.

It shifts beneath our builds like tectonic plates:
containers pulled anew, kernels patched in the night,
regions failing over to others,
certificates renewing while we sleep.

No SBOM or RBOM can chart this terrain.
It is the weather in which software lives –
the humidity of networks, the gravity of latency,
the quiet decay of credentials and caches.

You can only tend to it, never truly know it.
Just as you cannot own the sky,
you can only fly within it for a while.

III. The Myth of Determinism

And third — we keep believing that IT is static,
that systems are repeatable, that builds are reproducible,
that somewhere there exists a final, frozen state.

But it never was.
And every day, it becomes even less so.

Entropy seeps in through automation,
through updates that heal and break at once,
through AI that learns, through networks that reroute,
through data that grows old while we watch.

We chase determinism like a mirage,
knowing that the act of control already alters the system.

Perhaps it was never meant to be static at all —
but alive, in the quiet sense that rivers are alive:
always changing, never lost.