Quote the quote

Waiting for a friend, this thought surfaced:

“If you are not with 0 and 1 then you are in trouble.”

It sounds like a clever programmer’s bumper sticker. But sit with it longer and it becomes something more uncomfortable.

Every digital system—every database, every network packet, every sensor reading, every AI prediction—reduces eventually to binary representation. The abstraction layers we build are elaborate and useful, but they rest on a foundation that is irreducibly binary. Knowing this is not the same as understanding it, but understanding it changes how you think about what computers can and cannot do.

More pointedly: much of what gets called “technical intuition” in software development is really fluency with binary thinking. Not the bit manipulation itself, but the underlying disposition—discrete states, deterministic transitions, the absence of inherent meaning in a signal until a layer above it assigns meaning. A senior engineer who cannot articulate this clearly can still rely on it tacitly. A developer who has never internalized it will keep being surprised by behaviors that follow directly from it.

The trouble the quote refers to is real, though it shows up differently at different career stages. Early on, it is misunderstanding encoding bugs, off-by-one errors, floating-point surprises. Later, it is making architectural decisions without understanding the physical constraints underneath the abstractions. Later still, it is leading a technical organization without grasping why certain things are easy and certain things are not.

The abstraction is the point. Binary thinking is not about working at the bit level—it is about maintaining a mental model that remains honest about what the machine is actually doing, even when you are working several layers above it.

If you have lost that thread entirely, you are probably in some kind of trouble.