Code & Crafting
A Series by Set Lonnert • Books on Demand • 2026
Code Crafting is a series about how computing actually works and what it commits us to — written on the conviction that the technical and the philosophical questions are the same questions, asked at different depths.
The volumes are meant to be read in any order. Each stands on its own; read together they cut the field along different axes — across the foundations, down through a single language, outward toward artificial minds, and finally back to the daily condition of the work itself.
The Volumes
Computing & Languages
From Code to Computation moves across the field — from logic and data through algorithms and abstraction — mapping the foundations the digital age is built on.
The Language Stack cuts the other way, straight down through a single slice: building one small language by hand, from silicon to semantics, to feel what each layer actually commits us to.
From Code to Computation (2026)
A comprehensive exploration of computing from first principles, examining the philosophical and practical foundations that underpin our digital age.
Edition: 1
ISBN: 9789181142464
Weight: 1296 gram
Pages: 756
The Language Stack (2026)
From Silicon to Semantics. Building one small language all the way up — from a processor's fetch-decode-execute loop through lexer, parser, type system, interpreter, and a compiler that reaches real silicon — and asking, at each layer, what a programming language actually commits us to.
Edition: 2
ISBN: 9789181344387
Weight: 476 gram
Pages: 270
Minds, Machines & AI
The Conditions of Intelligence moves outward from AI systems — through architecture, consciousness, governance — toward the society they are entering.
The Worldless Machine reverses the direction: beginning from the cultural and historical conditions that produced AI, and asking what those conditions reveal about AI's character and consequences.
The Conditions of Intelligence (2026)
Artificial Minds, Human Questions. A philosophical inquiry into what
intelligence requires — examining the assumptions hidden inside our models and
the human questions no algorithm can dissolve.
Edition: 3
ISBN: 9789181143041
Weight: 425 gram
Pages: 240
The Worldless Machine (2026)
Language, Labor, and the Conditions That Produced AI. When large language models began producing fluent text, the concepts we use to describe minds — understanding, meaning, feeling — stopped working the way they always had. Not because the concepts were wrong. Because they were formed for a world that had never before contained anything like this.
Edition: 1
ISBN: 9789181344240
Weight: 284 gram
Pages: 156
Software & Its Limits
Apart from the pairs above, this one stands alone — turning from foundations and intelligence to the daily condition of the work itself.
Never Done asks why software is never finished: every rule we add only shifts the frontier of what remains unruled, so the making is less a matter of completing than of tending the unfinishable.
Never Done (2026)
The Double Non-Closure of Software Work. A function fails on a case its type checker passed. A service left untouched for a year suddenly will not run, because everything beneath it changed. One reveals the limit of rules; the other, the unfinished condition of software. This book argues that these limits are one — every rule only shifts the frontier of what remains unruled. Software making is therefore not the work of finishing, but of staffing the unfinishable.
Edition: 1
ISBN: 9789181342345
Weight: 98 gram
Pages: 46
Comfortication stands apart from Code Crafting — a smaller book in a smaller format, asking what human becoming loses when the last hard thing to be automated is thought itself.