The Parable of the Wrapper

“I looked into the source code, and the source code looked back at me.”
– Ancient commit, origin unknown

In the beginning, he was a man like any other.

A developer. A thinker. A creature of reason.

He wrote code. He shipped features. He debugged things. He complained — professionally — in GitHub issues.

One morning, he stumbled across a familiar sounding reddit comment:

"Cursor? Lol. It’s just a wrapper for ChatGPT."

Dismissive. Self-satisfied. As if that were enough.

He chuckled at first. But something ticked.

Just a wrapper?

He sat there starting at the comment.
Except he wasn't staring at the comment – he was staring through the comment.

He looked through his IDE and saw an LLM.
...through the LLM and struck language.
Language unraveled into thought.
Thought collapsed into electrical pulses.
Pulses fizzled into atoms, atoms into nothing,
and nothing into the void.

His mind recoiled.
He turned outward.

He thought:

"My app is just a wrapper into a database"
"...the database is just a wrapper into the file system"

Files became bits.
Bits, electrons.
Electrons, quantum foam.
Quantum foam...
...became his Monday standup.

He opened his terminal.
The cursor stared back.

He tried to write.
A variable. A function. A thought.

But nothing came forth.

He wasn’t building.
He was layering.
Wrapping.
Hiding.

He tried to fight it.
Declared he would code without wrappers.

No frameworks. No libraries. No helpers.

He reached for the DOM.

The DOM reached back.

His keyboard melted.
His monitor displayed only undefined — rendered at 60fps.
He cried out on StackOverflow. Only silence replied.

He tried to write a wrapperless function:

function create() {
  return create();
}

Was it infinite recursion?
Or recursion made flesh?

He could no longer tell.

But then — something changed.

The recursion halted.

He saw clearly now:

Everything is a wrapper. And it should be.

The wheel is a wrapper around foot pain.
Clothing, a wrapper around shame.
Love, a wrapper around fear.
Software, a wrapper around chaos.

Abstraction is not a betrayal — it's a blessing.

A refusal to suffer needlessly.
A love letter to future minds.
The most sacred act of engineering.

So now he builds again.

Not because he must, but because he may.

He wraps pain into tools.
Wraps chaos into clarity.
Wraps meaning into syntax.
And syntax into a story.

He smiles when they say:

“It’s just a wrapper.”

Because he knows we all are.